Winter's Tale

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After that odd and enigmatic little conversation, I wasn’t remotely sure what I would see when I opened the door. Gods and monsters were equally plausible, and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all to see the skinwalker or a horde of vampires or something equally unpleasant.

 

Instead, I found Moray sitting at a table, looking bemused and drinking tea. Sitting with him was a vaguely familiar woman who smelled like fox and spice. The scent was enough to jog my memory, and I realized she was Aiko’s mother.

 

On the whole, I might have preferred the monsters.

 

“Winter jarl,” she said to me, setting her tea on the table. It looked almost untouched. “I trust your meeting went well?”

 

“Yes,” I said, eyeing her warily.

 

“Very good,” she said. “I was hoping we might talk for a moment.”

 

“I would be honored,” I said. I was lying through my teeth, of course, but from what I’d heard of her she was the sort to appreciate formality whether it was honest or not. “Would you care to walk with me?” I wasn’t sure what this conversation was going to be like, but I had a strong suspicion that I didn’t want Moray there for it.

 

“Yes,” she said, standing. “Let us walk.”

 

I opened the door for her, which she seemed to appreciate, although the change in her expression was so subtle I’d never have noticed had I not been watching. “So,” she said, as I let the door swing closed behind us. “I understand you’ve been spending a great deal of time with my daughter.”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

 

“I haven’t,” she said frankly. “There aren’t many things I regret from my life, jarl. That’s one of them.”

 

“That you haven’t spent much time with her?”

 

“No. That I did so poorly as a mother that she won’t spend time with me.” She sighed. “It can be very hard to have children.”

 

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”

 

Her lips twitched into a smile, although it was so tiny and so brief that I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen it at all. I was getting the impression that was the default for her expressions. “No, I don’t suppose you would. Although that might change in the future.”

 

“I think that would probably be unnecessarily cruel to the child, ma’am.”

 

She definitely smiled at that. “More people should have such care. It’s too easy to do your best for your children and realize too late that it would have been kinder to do nothing.”

 

I cleared my throat. “Aiko makes it sound like you neglected her quite a bit, ma’am.”

 

“Towards the end. Yes. I’d hoped to give her the life I dreamed of, but by that time I’d realized that she didn’t want it.”

 

“So you left her alone.” I was trying not to sound accusatory, I really was, but I suspected I was failing.

 

She nodded. “It was too late by then for us to be reconciled, I think. Leaving her to herself seemed the next best thing.”

 

I nodded slowly. “I suppose I can understand that, ma’am.”

 

“Good. So tell me, jarl, do you love Aiko?”

 

“Yes, ma’am. Very much so.”

 

“That’s good,” she said. “So when are you planning to marry her?”

 

I cleared my throat. “I expect you know your daughter better than I do, ma’am.”

 

“Longer, certainly,” she said dryly. “Better? That isn’t so certain.”

 

“Maybe,” I agreed. “In any case, you have some idea what kind of person she is. Do you seriously think she’d want that kind of formal commitment?”

 

“Perhaps not,” she admitted. “I only want what is best for my daughter. I may not have always shown it very well, but I only ever wanted her to be happy.” She sighed, and it sounded like there was a hundred years of sadness pent up in that sigh. “Take care of my daughter, jarl,” she said wearily, turning off down a side street. “I can’t.”

 

I watched her go, then kept walking. “Well,” I said to myself. “That went better than I’d anticipated.” I hadn’t known quite what to expect from her, but from what Aiko had said I’d thought she would be quite a bit less pleasant than that.

 

Although, now that I thought about it, that was probably to be expected. I’d only heard Aiko’s side of the story, after all, and it had been pretty clear that there was plenty of bad blood between them to occlude her vision.

 

Then, because it was clearly a day for conversations I’d rather not have, I said, “Loki, Loki, Loki. You busy?”

 

“Not at the moment,” he said in my ear. “Although I do have an engagement later today. Why?”

 

I managed to keep my reaction to a small twitch, and glared at him as he stepped up beside me. “I have another question,” I said.

 

“My,” he said dryly. “You go more than a year without using any of the answers you paid for, and then you spend three in one week? Shocking. So what is it?”

 

“First off, I want to make a couple of statements. Statement one: After that mess last year, you left me a note mentioning apotheosis.”

 

“Yep,” he said cheerfully. “Not just making conversation, by the way. That really was my note. That’s a freebie for you.”

 

“Statement two,” I said, ignoring him. “A couple minutes ago, Arbiter said something suggesting that I’m a nascent demigod.”

 

“That sounds like something that old bastard would say,” Loki agreed.

 

“Question: What the hell are you people getting at?”

 

The deity paused and looked at me. His eyes were deep blue, as they usually were in public, but for a moment I glimpsed fire inside. His smile, too, was a little off, just twisted enough to remind me of the scars around his mouth.

 

“I’m glad you took it to heart when I said you could ask less specific questions,” he said. “That one is almost too tempting of an opportunity to pass up. But we did have a deal, so I won’t. Although honestly, I was expecting something like this quite a bit sooner.”

 

“I figured you were trolling me,” I said. “Trying to get me to waste questions, when your note didn’t actually mean anything. Which might still be the case, but if other people are going to take it seriously, I need to pay attention.”

 

“A reasonable thought,” he admitted. “But you should have learned by now that isn’t really the way I operate. Now, on to your actual question.”

 

“At heart,” he said, taking on more of a lecturing tone, “the answer to your question hinges on the answer to another question, which is, what does it mean to be a god? Now, you could ask people that question and get a great many answers, but for the sake of brevity I’m only going to discuss the one which I consider to be important, which is that a god is someone who knows what’s going on.”

 

I blinked. “That’s it?”

 

“Yes. If you understand how the world works, behind the scenes, then you can claim to be a god. If you understand why it works the way it does, then nobody’s likely to argue with you.” He grinned at me, the expression far too wide and toothy, and somehow even more twisted than his earlier smile. “With that in mind, let’s take a look at what you know.”

 

Oh, this should be good. I stopped walking and turned to face him. He took it in stride, stopping beside me. I noticed that people were giving us a wide berth without quite seeming to realize that’s what they were doing. Loki’s doing, most likely.

 

“First,” he said, “and most important, you’ve had a glimpse of the world behind the scenes. You know that the neat, ordered reality you live in is just a mask on the face of chaos. You know that your reality was constructed, you have an idea of who constructed it, and if you’re clever you have enough information that you could start working on how and why.”

 

I frowned. I hadn’t thought about it in quite that way, but I supposed he had a point. “Fair,” I said.

 

He rolled his eyes, sending another wave of flame through them before they died back to blue. “Thank you for your approval. Continuing, you also have an idea of what kind of power people like me have. You’ve seen that power being used in earnest, and there aren’t very many people who can say that. You know that time and space are both flexible concepts, subject to being manipulated and played with. And, on a more personal note, you know that life and death are arbitrarily defined states, and you’ve gone far enough into the shadows in between to know what they smell like.”

 

“But I can’t use any of that,” I protested. “I might know some of the tricks you do, but that doesn’t mean much if I can’t actually do the trick.”

 

“Ah,” he said, sounding excited. “But you’re thinking of divinity as an absolute—which is ironic, considering that most of the secrets I just mentioned are about recognizing that almost nothing is absolute. Figuring that out, seeing the things you’ve seen, that’s only the first step on the path, which is why you’re only a nascent demigod. Keep going, learn a few more secrets and start learning how to exploit a couple of them, and you’ll be the real deal.”

 

“And…that could actually happen?” I asked hesitantly. I’d never even contemplated that possibility.

 

“Could it happen?” He shrugged. “Sure. Anything could happen. Will it happen, now, that’s a trickier question. Plenty of people have gotten started on that path, but very few have followed it all the way to the end. You’re looking more promising than most, and definitely more than anyone has in recent years. It’s plausible enough that people are going to be paying attention.”

 

“Wonderful,” I said sourly.

 

He laughed. “Relax,” he said. “It’s no worse than what you’ve already been dealing with. The only difference is that now you know why they’re breathing down your neck. For now, I suggest you take some time to celebrate. You genuinely did win this time around, and I didn’t even have to nudge things in your favor to make it happen. Enjoy it.” He grinned at me, and bowed. “Congratulations, Winter.”

---

 

I ended up taking Loki’s advice, as insane as that was. I wanted to keep worrying, trying to wrap up loose ends, but there wasn’t really much to be done. The skinwalker was still out running around, but I wasn’t sure how I could track him down, let alone deal with him. I also didn’t really think he was going to be causing problems for me; he was powerful, undeniably, but also an opportunist, more scavenger than predator. He wouldn’t attack until I was vulnerable, and at the moment my position looked strong. The housecarls would adapt to their new situation more readily if I wasn’t looming over them, and I was happy to let Katrin finish cleaning house among the vampires of the city on her own. Even Alexis needed more than anything else to be left alone, so she could choose where she was going from here without feeling like I was pressuring her.

 

So I ended up going to dinner with Aiko, partially to celebrate and mostly to unwind and get used to the idea that things had actually gone right. Pryce’s wasn’t an option, for obvious reasons, so we ended up going to the Italian restaurant where Anna had been the head chef for quite a few years. She was long gone, but the food was still very good.

 

It was getting fairly late by the time we left, and there was no one else around. I was full—or as close to it as I got these days, anyway—and happier than I’d been in weeks. I was feeling peaceful, and relaxed, and not terribly inclined to think about anything in particular. Thus, it was a bit of a surprise when Aiko casually said, “Oh, hey. I got something for you a while back.”

 

I turned around, expecting to see something characteristically bizarre. A particularly exotic weapon, a knockoff toy with an amusingly bad design flaw, a piece of junk from an antique shop in the back streets of a bad neighborhood, something like that. Any of those would be an understandable gift from Aiko, and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all to see something along those lines.

 

What I saw instead was Aiko holding a ring.

 

More to the point, she was holding a ring in a manner that made it clear it was more than just a bit of jewelry that she’d found and thought I might like. There was significance in the gesture. She was smiling, a broad, I can’t believe I’m doing this sort of shit-eating grin, and her posture was both excited and nervous.

 

I stared. “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. I felt a little proud of how even and calm my voice was, all things considered.

 

She opened her mouth. I leaned forward a little, feeling such a strange and intense emotional cocktail that I couldn’t even begin to sort it out.

 

And then a spotlight went on, pinning us in a circle of light bright enough that I winced and had to blink back tears. At first I thought it was all part of the plan, but a quick glance at Aiko’s expression confirmed she was as surprised as I was.

 

“You have got to be freaking kidding me!” I shouted, turning towards the light. It was hard to see past the glare, but I was pretty sure I could make out the spotlight, mounted on what looked like an armored personnel carrier.

 

“This is the police. Put your hands in the air,” a voice shouted, probably through a megaphone. “We have you surrounded. Put your hands in the air.”

 

Goddammit. How do these things always happen at the worst possible time?

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Scáthach might have been in a hurry to deal with her misbehaving subjects, but she was still Sidhe. I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t try to rush me as I changed again and then got dressed. I took it slow, minimizing the pain, but it was still a pretty awful experience. That kind of silver exposure hurt, and it hurt on an energetic level, making it harder to change or heal. It might be days before I was operating at my peak again.

 

“Okay,” I said, pulling the last of the armor into place. “You asked me to either deal with them or give you an excuse to do so. From where I’m standing, I just did the second one.”

 

“Indeed,” she said, with a satisfied smile. “You did better than I anticipated, jarl. Very well. So much so that I will offer you a choice of reward.”

 

“Choice,” I said, with a sinking feeling. I’d known that she would find a way to screw me over, but that didn’t make it any more fun. “We had a deal. I took care of your people, and you take care of my problems with the Conclave. That was the deal.”

 

“Yes, and if you would like I will be quite pleased to keep that deal,” she said, with a nasty smile. “Or, instead of speaking to the mages on your behalf, I will wake the kitsune.”

 

Oh. Right. In the heat of the moment, fighting that duel, I’d almost forgotten that Aiko was unconscious. I glanced at her and confirmed that was still the case. She was lying on the ground, so still as to seem dead, with Legion standing guard on one side of her and Snowflake on the other. It could almost have been a charming picture, had it not been for Scáthach’s implication.

 

“What happens if you don’t wake her?” I asked.

 

Scáthach shrugged carelessly. Once again I was struck by how inhuman the gesture was, closer to a cat or an insect than a hominid. “Possibly you could find another way to rouse her. But I doubt you could do so easily or simply. This is the same potion that gave rise to your legends of the sleeping princess.” I must have looked too excited by that, because Scáthach smiled again. “And no, jarl, you will not be able to wake her with a kiss. That sort of modification to the recipe is more my counterpart’s domain than mine.”

 

“Right,” I muttered. “Of course.”

 

“So, then,” the Queen of Faerie purred. She was smiling, her eyes unsettlingly bright with an inhuman excitement. “What will you choose, oh jarl, my dear?”

 

“Damn you. You know what I’ll choose.”

 

“Of course,” she said. “But do you?”

 

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Wake her up, then. And Scáthach?” I said, before she could move. “I’m sure you could find a way to screw me over here. Don’t, okay? It would be the one step too far. You said this whole thing was about making me a useful tool. Pushing me on this topic is a great way to ruin that.”

 

She regarded me coolly. I’d thought I might piss her off by saying that, but if so, the emotion was too remote or too alien to be visible. “Very well,” she said. “You will find her in your home, alive and unharmed.” Then she gestured, very slightly, and both she and Aiko vanished.

 

I stood there for a minute or so, staring at the spot where she’d been. I was tired, and burnt, and on the whole I was feeling rather sorry for myself.

 

Then the doppelganger, who was still sitting on the ground next to Snowflake, cleared her throat. “Um,” she said. “What happens now?”

 

I looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re even,” I said. “You tried to screw me over, I caught you before you could really get started. Nothing personal on either side, right?”

 

She nodded. “It’s just business as far as I’m concerned. I’m fine with dropping it here. No debt or grudge to either side.”

 

“Sounds good,” I said. “Sorry for the rough treatment back there. I was kind of short on time, and I think you saw how serious the situation was.”

 

She nodded again, more emphatically. “Yes,” she said. She started to walk away, then paused. “Hey, you’re all right, you know that?” She produced what looked like a normal business card from somewhere and dropped it on the ground. “You ever need some work done, call that number. I’ll give you a discount.”

---

 

Damn,” Aiko said. “You really beat a Sidhe duke in a fair fight?”

 

I shrugged, trying and failing to get comfortable on the broken chair. The vampires hadn’t spent much time in our castle after we got away, but they’d done a number on it while they were there. I wasn’t concerned; nothing really valuable was missing or broken, and it would get fixed eventually. “Fairish. I mean, everything I did was legal, but I don’t know if I’d call it fair.”

 

She laughed. “That is so awesome. As pissed as Scáthach was at him, it might not even come back to bite you in the ass.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I notice that you don’t sound happy,” she said after a moment. “What gives?”

 

I opened my mouth to say that it was nothing, then paused. “Do you ever feel like what you need is just out of reach?” I asked. “It’s like you can see it, but when you try to grab it someone moves it away. I keep trying and trying to fix the problems, but it’s always one step forward, two steps back.”

 

“Is this about the problem with the Conclave?” she asked delicately.

 

I growled, though it was more frustrated than angry. “No,” I said. “No, Scáthach was never going to let me win that. I see that now. At least this way I got something worthwhile out of it. No, this is more fundamental, I guess. It’s like…even if I figured out a way to deal with the Conclave, it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I’d win today, but a month or a year down the road it’d just come back to bite me.”

 

“Yeah,” she said. “I know that feeling.”

 

“How do you cope with it?” I asked.

 

She shrugged. “Mostly I got really drunk and shot people. It’s easier to ignore when you do that.”

 

“That advice sounds disturbingly tempting,” I said after a moment.

 

She laughed. “That’s what I’m here for. Now come on, stop thinking about all the depressing stuff for a while. You’ve got three days until the Conclave meets again. You can figure out what to do about it later.”

 

I took her advice, and for a little while I managed to forget my frustrations with the world.

---

 

“Good morning,” Moray said, opening the door. I’d remembered to uncover my face before knocking this time. “You didn’t bring the kid.”

 

“No need. She already signed up with someone.” It might not be official yet, but it might as well be. Alexis was spending so much time talking to the Guards that I’d hardly seen her for days.

 

“Ah,” Moray said, somehow conveying a wealth of information in that one syllable. “That’s how it goes.”

 

“Have you trained any apprentices?” I asked. I’d never thought of Moray in that context, but something in how he’d sounded made me curious.

 

“Not personally,” he said, shrugging. “But I’ve helped with a few recruits, showing them the ropes.” He paused. “One of them got her face eaten by werewolves. She bled out right in front of me. Never even made it through basic training.”

 

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little inadequate. “I’m sorry.”

 

He shrugged again. “It’s the business,” he said. “You should get upstairs. You don’t want to be late. Seventh floor, same place as last time.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, going for the stairs. I made better time, without Moray and Alexis there.

 

Laurel must have been busy somewhere else, because the security station outside the auditorium was being staffed by a Watcher I didn’t recognize, a tall man wearing a suit and an elaborate, feathery metal mask. I put my weapons in the bin and stepped through the scanner, after which he directed me to sit and wait for an escort. He didn’t say anything else.

 

Not the most personable greeter. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to chat at the moment anyway.

 

Maybe twenty minutes later, the auditorium door opened, revealing Ivanov and Neumann. “Sorry for the wait,” Ivanov said. “They were setting up a trade agreement or something, and the guy just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

 

“What happened to him?” I asked idly as we walked in. As before, the room was crowded, and the sheer magnitude and variety of power was staggering. I hadn’t been paying enough attention to know whether the same people were attending or not.

 

“We ended up having to escort him out,” Ivanov said. “Escorted very firmly, if you get my drift.”

 

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down. I made sure to sit in a different chair than the last time, partially for security reasons and mostly for my own peace of mind. Anything else would be creepy.

 

I was still antsy, though, on the very edge of my seat. I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to hear next, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

 

Which was kind of silly, really. They weren’t actually deciding my guilt today, they were just deciding whether I was suspicious enough that they needed to. Even if they came down against me, it wasn’t like they would imprison me until the actual trial.

 

At least I hoped they wouldn’t. I’d only come for this because it would look bad if I didn’t, and I didn’t want to take the hit to my rep. I’d feel pretty stupid if I got killed as a result. I mean, there’s walking into the lion’s den, and then there’s just being a moron.

 

“The Conclave addresses the next issue,” Prophet said, maybe thirty seconds after I was in my chair. He was staring at me, and it was getting a little uncomfortable. I’d been on the receiving end of some pretty hard stares in the past, and even by my standards his grey eyes were intense. “This being the continuation of the initial hearing regarding the accusation of the jarl Winter Wolf-Born of the murder of the mage Zhang Qiang. Jarl, please stand.”

 

As before, I stood up. “Present,” I said.

 

“Noted. And do you continue to maintain your innocence of this charge?”

 

“I do,” I said without hesitation. It wasn’t like there was anything to gain by changing my tune now.

 

“Very well,” Prophet said. He was smiling a little, although it didn’t touch his eyes. “Arbiter, you requested a period for investigation and reflection before you made your statement. Have you satisfied your curiosity?”

 

“Regarding this topic, yes,” Arbiter said. He was also staring at me, but it was a more pleasant expression than Prophet’s. More neutral than friendly, but that was still a step up.

 

“And what have you found?” Prophet asked. I thought he sounded impatient with the way Arbiter was dragging this out, but I might have been imagining it.

 

“The arguments of his accusers have some merit,” Arbiter said. “And the accusation itself is most serious. But upon reflection, I do not think that this Conclave would be served by further investigation.”

 

“Then you vote to accept the jarl’s plea of innocence?”

 

“Yes. That makes a majority, Prophet.”

 

“Yes,” he said sourly. “It does. Jarl Winter, this Conclave finds your plea of innocence convincing. You will not be investigated further in regards to the crime you have been accused of, unless and until compelling evidence comes to light which brings your claim into question.”

 

I sort of stood there for a second, trying to process what I’d heard. I’d been ready for a lot of things today. I’d been prepared to recant my position and take the penalty. I’d been prepared to go home and make arrangements for living as a fugitive. If things went badly enough, I’d even been prepared to fight back and get my ass handed to me by a couple hundred mages.

 

Winning was…somewhat less anticipated.

 

“That concludes this trial,” Prophet said after a moment, apparently taking my silence as an indication that I understood. “This Conclave will reconvene in a quarter-hour to consider the final item on the agenda.”

 

I was still standing there, trying to adapt to a world in which I won without having to pay for it, when Arbiter approached me. As before, he seemed to glide across the stage, any movement hidden in the folds of his robe. “Guards,” he said. “Your services are no longer required. I will escort the jarl out.”

 

They wasted no time clearing out, although Ivanov did pause to shoot me a sympathetic look before he disappeared into the crowd. I followed Arbiter up the stairs, still feeling a little dazed. Once again, we were immediately enclosed inside a kinetic barrier powerful enough to stop sound waves from crossing it.

 

I had to admit, that impressed me. I mean, it’s one thing to do a barrier that strong. I can’t, but it isn’t all that impressive. But to do that, and move it as a single unit, while also walking and carrying on a conversation? That was something else. I could hardly imagine the mental discipline you would need to do something like that.

 

“So,” Arbiter said, very casually. “I imagine you’re wondering why that went the way it did.”

 

“Yeah. After what you said last time, I wasn’t expecting to get off easy.”

 

He nodded. “I expected as much, and I felt that you deserved an explanation. Thus this conversation. There are several reasons why I voted as I did, jarl, as there were various reasons why the other members of the Conclave said what they did.”

 

“What are they?” I asked, since he seemed to want prompting.

 

“The first is that, as I told you, my primary concern is stability and balancing the concerns of multiple parties. Your actions since the last time we spoke did a great deal to encourage stability within and between the Courts, which makes my job easier. That’s the first reason, and if anyone asks I expect you to present it as the only one.” Arbiter sounded calm and pleasant. I didn’t let that fool me into thinking he wasn’t serious. When somebody on that level tells you to do something, they don’t need to be overtly threatening to make sure that you’re listening.

 

“Okay,” I said. “But what are the others?”

 

“The next is political,” he said calmly, pushing the door of the auditorium open. The same Watcher as before handed me my bin of contraband and waved us through without question. “And,” Arbiter continued, “it is why I expect that the rest of the Conclave will not cause me significant problems as a consequence. You see, jarl, Scáthach tried to use us as a tool to intimidate you into submission.”

 

“Ah,” I said, understanding what he was getting at. “And you don’t like being used.”

 

“Precisely,” he said, nodding. “Part of my motivation today was to remind her that we aren’t under her control. If she wants something from us, she can approach us on an equal footing to negotiate for it. She can’t simply assume that she’ll get it for the asking.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. So what’s the third reason? You wouldn’t have bothered telling me if it was just those two, not when I could have figured them out on my own.”

 

He was silent for a long moment. “Correct,” he said at last, as we started down the stairs. “Although I want to make it clear that the rest of what I have to say is a secret, of the sort where those who share it are liable to be not just killed, but erased. Damnatio memoriae, or as close as we can arrange in this era.”

 

“Fun,” I said dryly. “I’ve heard a few similar secrets in the past, I think.”

 

“I wouldn’t doubt it, but this one is different. This one is ours.”

 

“The Conclave’s?” I asked.

 

“Yes. And also humanity’s. Tell me, jarl, how many rules do the Watchers enforce?”

 

I opened my mouth, then paused. “I don’t know,” I said. I’d always meant to look into that, but I’d never quite gotten around to it.

 

“Four,” Arbiter said, sounding very, very serious. “Four very specific laws. You may not raise the dead, or experiment with the transition between life and death, or any intermediate states. You may not attempt to find the outer boundary of the Otherside. You may not experiment with the border between reality and the spirit world, or attempt to shift an object from one state to the other. You may not change the fundamental nature of a thing.”

 

“Okay,” I said after a moment. It didn’t seem too important, since none of those were things I was capable of, but I supposed it was worth knowing. “What about not telling the world at large about magic?”

 

“That’s not so much a rule as a guideline,” Arbiter said dismissively. “And a relatively recent one, at that. No, what I want you to think about is why the Watchers would have such a specific set of rules.”

 

I thought about it for a few seconds. “Presumably,” I said slowly, “because something happened to make them think that those areas of study were dangerous.”

 

Which, when I thought about it, was terrifying. I mean, the things a mage could do without breaking any of those rules could be horrifying and awful. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was so bad that it made that look harmless.

 

“Exactly,” Arbiter said, sounding pleased that I’d gotten it. “Four very specific events occurred. Now, and this is the part which we’ve gone to great lengths to keep from becoming public knowledge, the first Conclave had more than nine members. There were four others, whose roles haven’t been preserved. Hunter, Healer, Namer, and Dreamer.”

 

Four people. Four rules. It wasn’t hard to figure out what Arbiter was getting at.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Healer is obviously the one who tried to raise the dead. Dreams are related to the spiritual, so it would make sense that Dreamer was doing work related to that. The other two….” I shook my head. “I’ve got nothing.”

 

“Hunter had a gift for space magic, an intimate connection to the idea of location, and a passion for exploring. Namer….” Arbiter frowned, and there was something very uncomfortable about his pause. “Namer,” he said at last, speaking delicately, “was working in a field so esoteric and specific that even knowing it exists is a violation of the law. No one’s entirely sure just what he was doing, but it involved the idea that if you were to change the basic nature of a thing, its apparent properties would change to match.”

 

“So what went wrong?” He hesitated, and I snorted. “Come on, man. You can’t tell me all these secrets and then shut up when it finally gets to the good part.”

 

“Healer was experimenting on boundary states between life and death,” he said. “Her experiments produced the first vampire. Dreamer was doing something similar in a very different field, trying to find the relationship between the idea of a thing and the thing itself. His work resulted in the disappearance of a great many people. The city of Tikal never recovered. Hunter was exploring the far reaches of the Otherside, trying to find its limits. We don’t know what he found there, but the Sidhe Courts have been at war ever since.”

 

“Wow,” I said after a moment. “That’s…wow. What about Namer?”

 

There was another long, delicate pause. “As I said, we aren’t sure what he was doing,” Arbiter said at last. “But at the end of it, three gods were dead, and two others had been born.”

 

“Okay. This is…kind of more than I can process. You know that, right?”

 

“Yes, but I’m hoping that you grasp enough of it to understand what I’m saying. For example, I hope that at this point you understand why the Watchers work to prevent anyone else from experimenting with those fields of magic. The risks of a similar catastrophe happening again are simply too high. And hopefully you also see why anyone who courts such a disaster, even unintentionally, must be dealt with.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “And Zhang was helping people get around the rules.”

 

“Precisely,” Arbiter said. “And that, jarl, is the true reason I didn’t speak against you. People who enable that kind of risk-taking must be eliminated. That he was permitted to do so for so long is shameful. As far as I am concerned, your actions should be rewarded, not punished.” He shrugged. “And besides, it’s seldom a bad idea to be on good terms with a nascent demigod.” We reached the bottom of the stairs, and he nodded to me. “Now that I’ve explained that, I have a meeting to get back to, and I believe there’s someone waiting to speak with you. Good day, jarl.”

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I was working when Loki came to visit. This wasn’t unusual; I didn’t sleep, and eating was a rare necessity. I could, and often did, work for days at a time.

 

Life was simpler that way.

 

I felt it when he manifested himself in my workshop, although I didn’t turn away from my work. It was a simple lump of metal at the moment, not even fully refined yet. Closer to ore than bullion, really. When I was finished with it, it would be a fine golden bauble, such as any rich woman would be pleased to wear.

 

I felt a momentary frustration at the thought. In comparison to the works I’d once crafted, it felt so…petty.

 

I pushed the feeling away. I’d made this choice for a reason. It might be petty, spending my time on baubles, but it was still better than what I’d once done. Baubles do no harm.

 

I’d almost finished refining the metal when Loki sighed. “You’re an ass,” he said. “You know that, right, Dvalin?”

 

I grunted and turned the metal over in my hands. It flowed under my fingers, the last of the waste running out and leaving gold behind. I ignored the dross for the moment; I would extract any valuable materials from it later.

 

“Of course,” Loki said. “More time for me to talk, then. And I want to talk about the kid.”

 

I looked at the god for the first time since he manifested. He was wearing a slender Nordic body, something that would have looked quite at home on a longship back in the day. His shadow gave the lie to the mask, though, at least to my eye. It was the shadow of something far larger, a hulking beast that couldn’t have walked through the garage door of the shop. He breathed and the shadow moved in unison, and just the movement of the shadow was enough to rattle tools on the workbenches.

 

I wondered whether he was putting on a show for my benefit. Surely he could have concealed this sign of his power, if he wanted to. I was old, but clairvoyance and divination had never been my specialties; I knew better than to imagine I could see beneath his mask if he didn’t want me to.

 

“The boy is none of your business,” I said at last, turning my attention back to the metal in my hands.

 

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. I’ve made an investment in him. That makes him my business, quite literally.”

 

I grunted. “Out with it, then.”

 

“As you know, the child is attracting the attention of more people than just myself.” Loki’s voice was a purr now, smooth as silk. “If he wants to survive that attention, he’s going to need a weapon.”

 

“I don’t make weapons.” Not anymore, I didn’t. I’d had enough of weapons.

 

“Fortunately,” Loki said, and now there was something in his voice that was sharp enough to make me look at him again, “I wasn’t thinking of a new weapon. I had something old in mind. Something very old, even.”

 

I knew what he meant, and it was serious enough that I set the lump of gold down and turned to face him. “You know what that sword is for,” I said. “You know what it does to people. And you want me to give it to someone I give half a damn about?”

 

“He’s going up against a Twilight Prince this time,” Loki said with a twisted smile. In the background, his smile grinned as well, showing teeth the size and shape of swords. “He’s going to need a weapon that poses a threat to them, if he wants them to take him seriously.”

 

I grunted again, thinking. “That sword is poison,” I said. “We made it to be poison.” It had been an intelligent, if somewhat brutal, decision. If you were going to put a weapon like that in someone’s hands, you didn’t want them to live long enough to turn it against you.

 

“Yes,” Loki agreed. “But if you don’t give it to him, he’s going to die. Not a threat, by the way, just a statement of fact. He dug too deep, too fast, and there aren’t many other weapons that could get him out of the hole he’s in.”

 

“If I do give it to him,” I countered dryly, “he won’t survive. Not as who he is now.” In all its long history, nobody had ever carried Tyrfing for more than a handful of days without changing. And Winter was already a werewolf, already a blood mage, already carrying the weight of far more temptation than most people could bear up under.

 

“Surely that’s better than death,” Loki murmured. He was still smiling, but there was something wrong with it now, even beyond his typical scarred features. It wasn’t a good smile.

 

I pictured what Winter might turn into, under the influence of that sword, and shook my head. “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Sometimes dead is better.”

 

“That’s funny,” Loki said, and now there was an edge to his voice, something sharp and bitter. “I remember you saying something much different, all those years ago. Something about how binding my son was the kindest thing you could do for him?”

 

I looked at Loki, but I wasn’t seeing him. I was seeing a long-ago forge, with six impossibilities lying on the workbench. I was seeing the ribbon running through my fingers after it had been finished, soft and smooth but far too strong to be broken.

 

And I was seeing the pitiful, hopeless look on the wolf’s face when they put the fetter on him.

 

Many would say that the fetter was a metaphor, a concrete representation of the abstract limits which had been put on Fenrir’s power. They would be right, and also wrong. There’s reality, and there’s metaphor, and when you’re dealing with gods there’s also a certain grey area where the two concepts overlap.

 

“I was wrong,” I said, pulling my attention back to the moment. “I was wrong to say it, I was wrong to make it, and I was wrong to stand by and let them use it. Are you happy now, Loki? I was wrong.”

 

“No,” he said. “No, happy definitely isn’t the word for it.”

 

“Then why,” I asked sharply, “do you want me to do the same thing again?”

 

He seemed to consider it for a moment. “Would you believe me,” he said at last, “if I told you that he’ll be happier for it in the long run? It’ll change him, yes, but not for the worse. Or at least not entirely.”

 

“And why would you know better than I what will make him happy?”

 

Loki smiled again. “Because he’s his father’s son.”

 

I stared at him for a moment, then slumped. “Yes,” I said listlessly. “I suppose he is.”

 

“Then you’ll do it?”

 

I grunted and nodded, picking up the piece of gold again. Soon, I knew, I would have to go and fetch the blade from its resting place back in Svartalfheim—and that was a conversation I certainly wasn’t looking forward to. In the meantime, though, I could finish this pointless little bauble. I could remind myself that I had made more than just evil swords and chains for gods.

 

Loki ceased to manifest himself after a few minutes of watching me work. The shadow stayed for several long moments. A reminder, that Loki could be watching at any time, and I might not have any way to tell.

 

As threats went, it was a good one. Subtle, yes, but…ominous.

---

 

I arranged to meet Winter at an old, largely abandoned garage. It was one of my secondary workshops, where I had done work that I didn’t want associated with my business. Or rather, it had been one of my secondary workshops; I wasn’t going to be coming back after this. I was planning to burn it down within a day or two, in fact.

 

I regretted that a little. I still had some of my kin’s characteristic hoarding instinct, although I’d largely transferred it away from physical goods. Recognizing that skills and secrets were more valuable was one of the few real pieces of wisdom I’d won with age.

 

Winter showed up late and seemed suspicious about the whole thing, which was good. I’d have been worried if he trusted this arrangement. I hardly paid any attention to the conversation as I told him that I knew he was in a dangerous situation, and I had a weapon that might help. I avoided the topic of how I knew that, and I never said that I wanted him to take it. An oath to speak no lies can be bothersome, but once you’ve learned to choose your words with care it proves less so than one might expect.

 

And then he took the sword. I watched as it began to sink its teeth into him, already making the connections that would hold it to him. They were still incomplete, more tasting than biting; Tyrfing wouldn’t truly establish a connection until it had been used to kill, and it wouldn’t recognize ownership unless the death were an act of betrayal. A safety measure we had built into it, all those centuries before.

 

I wondered what it said about us, that we considered limiting its use to the ruthless and desperate a safety measure. At the time, it had made sense. We would prevent it from being used casually, ensure that its wielder truly needed the power. We would keep it from falling into the hands of the weak-willed, where it could cause serious harm.

 

In hindsight, there were probably better ways to approach the problem.

 

I stood outside, draped in a simple grey cloak, as Winter experimented with the sword and then walked out. He didn’t notice me, as I’d expected. That cloak was woven through with magic, not so much invisibility as insignificance; he could see me, but his eyes slid from one side to the other without recognizing me as more than a background object. It was an old Sidhe approach that I’d learned to duplicate with the runic magic that I favored, and it was as effective now as it had always been.

 

I watched him go, carrying the sword with a gingerly manner that suggested he had some conception of how dangerous it was. That was good; for him to have recognized it so soon, and to be treating it with respect and a little fear rather than desire, those were good signs. They suggested that Loki was right, and the sword wouldn’t dominate his personality.

 

I wondered, as he left, what it meant. What the consequences of my choice would be. Had I in some measure atoned for my sins, as Loki had claimed? Or had I compounded them?

 

I sighed and turned away. I supposed that I would find out eventually. In the meantime, there was work to be done.

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“What manner of trial?” I asked, with a sort of morbid curiosity. I was sure it wasn’t going to be the boring kind, with a judge and a courtroom. It was never that easy.

 

“Precisely the question I was just considering,” Scáthach said, with a smile that looked uncomfortably similar to that of a cat watching a canary. “Trial by ordeal would be amusing, but there aren’t many ordeals that would be fair. Most of those I could think of would be crueler to one of you than the other.”

 

Most, I noted. Not all. She was playing with me, and I suspected she was playing with him just as much. Not just a cat watching a canary, a cat holding a canary. She knew what choice she was going to make. Probably she’d known since before I’d even called her.

 

“Trial by combat,” she said, as though she’d stumbled onto some great revelation. “That would be fair. Let you prove the rightness of your respective positions.”

 

“You really like your duels, don’t you?” I said. “First Pier, then this.”

 

“I am a traditionalist,” she said, smiling even wider. “Speaking of which, let us consider the rules under which this duel shall be fought. I think it would be appropriate to follow the traditions of my people, as this accusation is entirely within the framework of my Court.”

 

The traditions of her people? What was that supposed to mean? And why was she smiling?

 

I realized it a moment before she continued. “Iron, naturally, will be banned,” she said. “The duel shall be fought within the confines of the circle; any exit shall be considered a forfeit. The duel shall be fought to surrender, or to the point of death if neither party concedes.”

 

Shit. At one stroke, she’d effectively crippled me. Forbidding iron and steel meant that I wouldn’t have my armor, or Tyrfing, which were my only real advantages in a fight with one of the fae. If I fought as a human, I would be reduced to a handful of knives and some stored spells. As a wolf, my greatest strength was mobility, which was almost useless if we couldn’t step outside the circle.

 

I eyed the Sidhe noble I was supposed to be dueling, sizing him up. He was wearing armor, some material that looked like silver, and carrying a sheathed sword. He was smiling, a confident, smug sort of smile.

 

“What if I do not like these rules?” I said, thinking furiously. I was trying to come up with options, and so far I wasn’t having much luck.

 

“I would consider it an admission that your accusation is false,” Scáthach said. “In which case you would owe a debt to my Court, as recompense for unfairly having insulted the honor of one of my subjects.”

 

Wonderful. Behind one door was a fight which was stacked against me so hard that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the person I was supposed to fight had been coached on my weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Behind the second was owing a favor to Scáthach, being found guilty by the Conclave, and having whatever reputation I’d managed to accrue ripped to shreds.

 

Did I even want to know what was behind door number three? I suspected not. I could probably talk her into changing the rules, or dismissing the whole concept of a trial by combat, but there would be a cost. It was almost guaranteed that I wouldn’t be making my situation any better. Dealing with the fae was not unlike quicksand; they were experts at ensuring that every move you made just drew you in deeper.

 

The one bright side, in this situation, was that same patience I had been bemoaning earlier. They were immortal; a few minutes was essentially immaterial to them. Neither of them seemed to have any problem with standing there in total silence while I thought through my situation.

 

Okay. Things were bad. But the reason things were bad was that I’d gotten myself into this position. If you wanted to beat the fae, you had to think in twisty ways, you had to move so far away from what you wanted that it had to come to you instead. Above all else, you had to do something they weren’t expecting, because if you gave them what they were expecting they’d play you like a fiddle. I’d been moving in straight lines this whole time, thinking that the situation was straightforward, and I’d gotten screwed as a result.

 

So. In this situation, she was expecting me to back down. That was the smart, rational, predictable thing to do. I would back down, eat crow, and she’d own me. Slightly less rational was that I’d try to talk to my way out of it, attack one of the positions she’d used to justify these rules, or worm my way out of it somehow. I was confident that she had something planned if I tried that. It’s pretty much impossible to beat the fae at rules lawyering. They invented it.

 

So I couldn’t back down. I couldn’t talk my way out of the fight. Could I actually win?

 

I looked at the duke again, more critically. He was armed and armored in what I was willing to bet was a silver alloy, which was a problem, but the fact that he’d felt the need for that equipment was telling. He was a noble, a politician. He’d probably fought to get there—it would be hard to achieve a high position in the Midnight Court without being a hardened killer—but since then he’d had minions to do his dirty work for him.

 

I had minions, too, but I’d kept myself hands-on. Jötnar, much like werewolves, expected their leaders to lead from the front and handle threats personally. The Sidhe were basically the opposite, considering it an admission of weakness to fight for yourself. There was a good chance that I’d done more fighting recently than he had.

 

It would be risky. But hell, that was inevitable. If I kept playing the odds, the house would inevitably win in the long run.

 

“The terms are accepted,” I said.

 

Scáthach didn’t blink, but I thought there might be the tiniest hesitation before she continued. “Very well,” she said. “I shall draw the circle.”

 

“Draw?” I said. “Why? We are standing in a circle, at present, one which has been used by your people for hundreds of years. We would be following an ancient tradition, in using it as our dueling ground.”

 

I was sure she hesitated, this time, but there wasn’t a lot she could do. She couldn’t argue with what I’d said without admitting that her reasons for restricting my choice of weapons had been a front. She could have overruled me, of course, but this was a Faerie Queen; she’d rather die than admit she’d been outmaneuvered, even for a moment.

 

“Very well,” she said at last.

 

“Good,” I said with a smile. I’d managed to retain some advantage, at least. “Allow me to remove my associates from the field and prepare myself, and we can begin.”

 

They didn’t argue, and I walked down the hill to the edge of the faerie ring. I carried Aiko, and Snowflake herded the doppelganger along. Legion walked at a distance from us, silent as usual. He gave no indication of his thoughts or feelings about the duel, if he even had any.

 

The same could not be said of Snowflake. This is stupid, she said. You’re going to get yourself killed. Remember the last time you tried to fight a duel against someone from the Courts?

 

That was Carraig, I pointed out. He’s a much better fighter than this guy. He had to be, in order to maintain order as Scáthach’s champion. He had to be. I was relying on that, because Carraig had kicked my ass so hard there was no question of fighting back, and while my skills had improved since then, I knew for a fact that he could still take me down any time he felt like it.

 

If I was wrong in my estimation of their relative competence, this trial by combat was going to be short and embarrassing.

 

It’s still a stupid idea, Snowflake said. You just set yourself up for a fair fight against someone who came here expecting to fight you. Since when is that your specialty?

 

True, I admitted. I’m hoping I can make it less of a fair fight than it’s supposed to be. If not, well…you have a better idea? Because I spent a while thinking about it, and I’ve got nothing.

 

No. Just don’t be stupid. The way she phrased it, you can always just back down.

 

I might be better off dying, I said, not entirely joking.

 

I wouldn’t.

 

Great. No pressure.

 

At the base of the hill, I stepped over the line of mushrooms and set Aiko on the ground. She didn’t respond at all, not even a reflexive twitch. If she hadn’t been breathing I’d have wondered whether she was even alive.

 

Then I started stripping off my armor, stacking it neatly on the ground. I kept my cloak, although I had to take quite a few of my toys out of it. The rest of my clothing I folded and set on top of the armor. My leather bracelet I took off and wrapped loosely around my neck.

 

The pain of the change was distracting, but I was used to thinking through distractions. As my body started to warp and shift, I focused on the coming fight, planning my attack. It was hard, just because there were so many unknowns, but I could establish some broad strategic goals. My priorities were disarming my enemy, maintaining my own mobility, and keeping him from landing a decisive blow. He was likely to go for a quick win, simply because he knew what I was capable of and I had no idea what he could do. That gave him an advantage, but it was one that would fade quickly as I observed his behavior.

 

So. Keep moving, aim for the long game, and assume every attack was possibly lethal. Try for hit-and-run tactics, using the larger space I’d managed to arrange. Debilitate him if I got the chance. It was a vague plan, but that was the best I could really hope for under the circumstances. Good enough.

 

I pushed myself to my feet, wincing a little. My left foreleg was mostly numb, which made me a little slower on my feet than I’d once been, but I was still quicker than a human. With luck, it would be quick enough.

 

I stepped across the line of mushrooms again, leaving the others outside. My cloak dragged against the ground as I did, and I reshaped it to hug my body more closely. The result looked a little like those sweaters some people put on dogs, which wasn’t exactly the fashion statement I’d have liked to make, but screw it. It would work.

 

The center of the circle was in the house at the top of the hill, so that was where I went. As expected, I found Scáthach and the other Sidhe standing in the same room I’d left them in. I’d been gone for almost twenty minutes, arranging things to my liking and changing, but they didn’t even seem to have moved.

 

“Jarl,” she said as I walked into the room. “Are you prepared?”

 

I nodded, my eyes on the person I was supposed to be fighting. He was smiling, a little, but I could tell that he was more nervous than he wanted me to think. It was easy to see in the way he was standing, the way one hand rested on his sword. He hadn’t been expecting me to fight, I was guessing.

 

“Excellent,” Scáthach said, holding one hand out in front of her. She was holding what looked like a black silk handkerchief, which twisted in a nonexistent wind. “Let no weapon be drawn until this cloth touches the ground.”

 

I tensed, ready to move. The Sidhe duke was gripping his sword openly now. The room was dead silent, not even the sound of breathing to disturb the stillness. My heart was pounding, rapid and strong, ready for the coming exertion.

 

Scáthach disappeared, leaving the handkerchief to fall. I paid her no mind, all my attention focused on the scrap of cloth drifting through the air. It caught a crossbreeze and fluttered sideways, teasing, before it fell again. I heard the whisper of silk against wood as it brushed against the floor.

 

He heard it, too. At the exact moment it touched down, he lunged forward, drawing his sword as he did. It crackled with some kind of energy, and I no longer had any doubt that it was silver. Out of its scabbard, it ached, even at a distance.

 

But he’d reacted too fast to think. He’d been expecting me to hesitate, or back away, and I did neither. I charged straight at him instead, throwing myself forward with all four feet. I hit his left knee with my right shoulder, knocking him off balance, and then I was past. I was inside the arc of his swing, and he barely clipped my tail on the way by.

 

It hurt, a little. More from the proximity of the silver than anything; I was fairly confident he hadn’t even touched skin. I leapt for the window while he was off balance. I’d been expecting to shatter it, and relying on fur to stop most of the glass, but I got lucky. It popped out in one piece and I was through, leaving the glass to break on the ground behind me.

 

I trotted over to the open ground in front of the door, waiting. It took a minute or so for the duke to come out, but he wasn’t favoring the leg I’d hit. Pity. He had his sword in one hand, and the other upraised. He pointed at me with his empty hand as soon as he came through the door, and I jumped aside. There was nothing visible there, but I wasn’t taking chances.

 

Which was just as well, because an instant later the grass I’d been standing on started to wither and die. I still couldn’t see anything, but I could smell some kind of magic, distinctively Sidhe with notes of death and decay. Not something I wanted to get hit by, I was pretty confident.

 

He rushed at me without waiting to see whether his magic would connect. I was still off balance, and I couldn’t dodge away as easily as I would have preferred. The sword barely clipped my shoulder, and it hurt. Not just the pain of silver, although that was considerable; there was also something almost like being hit with an electrical current, sharp pain and twitching muscles.

 

I bit at his sword hand, though, and drew blood. I backed away before he could strike again, testing the injured limb, and found that it could support my weight easily enough.

 

We were both looking at each other with a sort of respect, now. I was slowed and made even more clumsy by the damage to my shoulder, but his grip was weakened. It was hard to say which of us had come out on top in that first clash.

 

I was right that he would try to win fast, though. I’d barely had a chance to determine that my leg was still working before he moved toward me. I turned tail and ran for the small cluster of trees that was the only real cover on the hill, wrapping myself in shadows as I went. Even injured and clumsy, four feet were better than two, and I outdistanced him easily enough.

 

Most of my mind was on analyzing that exchange of blows. I was pretty sure, from how it had gone, that I was right about this duke. He was fast, undeniably, faster than anyone had a right to be, but there was something lacking. It was hard to say quite what it was. Certainty, maybe, a confidence that what he did would work. He was missing the killer instinct that would have taken him from a skilled fighter to a terrifying one.

 

I made it to the trees, where my cloak of shadows would let me blend into the darkness, and turned to look back. I’d hoped that he would keep chasing me into the trees and I could ambush him, but there was no such luck. He seemed content to wait out in the open, and considering what he was, I had no confidence that I could outwait him. I could be patient when I had to, but eventually I would need to eat, or drink, or sleep. There was no guarantee that he would.

 

Then I noticed that he was still bleeding. I could smell it. That was a welcome surprise. I’d gotten so used to fighting things that could recover from almost any injury that I’d almost forgotten that you could hurt something and have it stay hurt.

 

That made my mind up for me. I moved out the other side of the trees, keeping my shadows tightly wrapped around myself, and started to circle around the hill. I knew better than to think my concealment would hold up against the direct scrutiny of any of the Sidhe, let alone one of their dukes, but with luck he would think that I was still in the trees. If he didn’t actually look at me, I might have a chance.

 

Even with a bad leg, I could move pretty quickly as a wolf. I circled around, out of sight, and then started up over the hill. In less than a minute, I was lurking in the shadow of the house, looking down at him.

 

I’d gotten lucky again. His attention was still focused on the grove of trees, and he appeared quite willing to wait there ’til the end of days. He had his sword out, but it wasn’t in a ready position, more just hanging by his side.

 

Now I focused on stealth, rather than speed. I wasn’t great at it, but I’d learned to move pretty quietly over the years, and a little bit of magic woven through the air and shadows around my paws muffled the noise even more. Between that, my cloak, and the fact that his attention was focused elsewhere, I thought that I might be able to get within fifty feet of him before he realized that I had moved.

 

I’d overestimated my skill, or underestimated his alertness. I’d barely covered half the distance between us when he perked up and started to glance in my direction, alerted by some small noise or scent. Or hell, maybe he’d felt the magic I was working; that kind of thing was natural for the Sidhe, after all.

 

I gave up on stealth entirely and just sprinted at him. He turned to face me and then visibly startled, flinching away. I couldn’t really blame him for it; from his perspective, a vaguely wolf-shaped patch of darkness had just started running at him at the next best thing to fifty miles per hour.

 

He recovered almost immediately, but I was already pretty close to him by that point. He started to raise his sword, and I could smell some kind of magic, but I was already leaping for him. I hit his upraised arm and clung, dragging him off balance, biting at his hand. The silver stung my paws and mouth, but I accepted it as the cost of doing business and kept biting, tearing at his fingers with my teeth.

 

He was wearing armored gauntlets, but they were never intended to stand up to this kind of focused assault. It was only a few seconds before I’d done enough damage to his hand that he couldn’t maintain his grip, and the sword fell to the ground.

 

I let go a moment later, picking up the sword in my mouth. Apparently even the hilt was made of some silver alloy, because that hurt too, burning my lips and tongue. I forced myself to ignore the pain and start running down the hill.

 

I’d barely taken three steps before the magic he’d been preparing hit me, wracking me with waves of pain. My muscles clenched and I tripped, bouncing head over heels down the hill. The muscle convulsions did serve one purpose, in that my jaws clamped down on the sword, preventing it from bouncing out or twisting on the way down. I even got lucky and didn’t disembowel myself with the thing.

 

When I came to rest, I was at the bottom of the hill, at the very edge of the dueling ground. Literally; some of the mushrooms of the faerie ring were pressed outward where I was lying on them.

 

Not quite out of the circle, though. Not quite disqualified.

 

It took me a few seconds to stand, and when I did my movements were still jerky and uncoordinated. I quickly moved back from the edge, lest I accidentally fall and land outside the circle.

 

Then, while the Sidhe was still halfway up the hill, I jerked my head and let go of the sword. It wasn’t a great toss, this not being something I’d practiced much, but the sword still flew a decent distance. It spun once in the air and then hit the ground, sinking in easily, so that it ended up sticking out of the dirt about fifteen feet outside the circle.

 

I shook my head, trying to clear the burning and numbness from my mouth, and then trotted up the hill a ways, grinning at the Sidhe. He was hesitating, and it wasn’t hard to see why. That sword had clearly been his main weapon, and it was going to be hard for him to get it back. He could conceivably go to the edge of the circle and throw a rope or something for it without breaking the rules, but he’d need at least a minute to do it.

 

That left us at something of an impasse. He was missing his sword, and I was guessing he’d used most of the magic he was going to. He’d thrown some fairly big punches already, after all, and he couldn’t be that much of a specialist in combat magic or he wouldn’t have needed a sword. He was still wearing that silver armor, though, which would slow me down considerably.

 

Neither of us was in a good position to hurt the other, then, and both of us were already injured. My mouth still hurt from carrying that sword, and I could smell the blood from his hand. All things considered, it was hard to say which of us was in the worse position.

 

Which, compared to where we’d started this fight, was a considerable step up for me. I was pretty sure he felt similarly, which was nice. Not so much because of the satisfaction I got from seeing his frustration, although it was considerable; no, I was more glad because it suggested that I was right.

 

He seemed less inclined to rush in now that he was disarmed, and I had no objection to keeping my distance for a minute. It would give the silver-inflicted burns on my mouth and paws some time to heal.

 

We circled each other for a minute or so, looking for weaknesses. I didn’t see any beyond what I’d already noted, which was troubling. I might have improved my situation, but he was still basically dressed in a suit of silver. It was going to be hard for me to do any real damage to him while he was wearing that. He knew it, too, which meant I couldn’t just scare him and hope the he’d surrender. It would have to be a credible threat to get a reaction out of him.

 

Fortunately, there was more than one way to win this fight.

 

I kept circling until I was on the uphill side, then charged. I feinted low and he crouched, trying to slash at me before remembering that I’d taken his weapon. Then I jumped at his face.

 

He caught me, trying to force me to grapple. It was a good move for him; every second in contact with him would be burning me, while my own attacks would likely skid aside on his armor. Fortunately for me, his grip was weak where I’d bit his hand, and I was able to squirm out of it after just a couple seconds.

 

Then I set my hind feet against his chest, and jumped.

 

There are certain rules that even supernatural beings can’t lightly ignore. Newton’s third law of motion is one of them. I’d put a bunch of force into him by jumping off of him like that, and not even magic could just make that force go away.

 

The force on me was sufficient to let me clear almost ten feet before I hit the ground. A proportional force, when he was already off balance from trying to catch almost two hundred pounds of wolf, was more than the duke could withstand. He fell.

 

And then, as people wearing armor who get pushed down on a hill without expecting it tend to do, he rolled.

 

Given a little time, he probably would have been able to self-arrest. But it wasn’t a very tall hill, and it was a fairly steep one. He rolled, and kept rolling until he reached the bottom.

 

I watched for a moment, but there was no indication that he had forfeited. I would have expected Scáthach to show up and declare it if he did, and she made no such appearance. Evidently he was in the same position I’d been in, brushing against the mushrooms of the faerie ring without quite crossing them.

 

I growled a little at that. I hate it when a fight goes fairly.

 

It was tricky fetching something from my cloak without hands, but I’d designed it well. I was able to dig out a small crystal sphere with my teeth and lob it at him before he’d finished standing up again.

 

It was a terrible throw, wildly off-target. I reached out and put a tailwind behind it, adjusting the density of the air around it so that it would go where I wanted it to.

 

It still wasn’t a great throw. It wouldn’t hit him. But it would get close enough that he would be in the blast radius when it hit the ground.

 

He saw it coming, and I was sure he could feel the magic in it. He reacted on instinct, moving the only way he could to get away from it. He stepped across the line.

 

A moment later, the sphere hit the ground and burst with a flash of light and a high-pitched howl. Harmless, although he’d had no way to know that. And, in fairness, I was carrying lethal spells and I’d have used one of them without hesitating if I could have. The flashbang had just been the first thing I grabbed.

 

And a moment after that, Scáthach stepped up next to him. I wasn’t sure where she stepped up from; she was just there, without any warning. Par for the course when it came to the fae, really.

 

“Duke,” she said, loudly enough that I could hear her halfway up the hill. “By exiting the circle, you have shown your lack of commitment to your position. I find in the jarl’s favor in your dispute. Return to your demesnes and await my displeasure.”

 

He bowed to her and turned away. A portal appeared in front of him after around thirty seconds and he stepped through it—without, I noticed, having said a single word since he showed up. Scáthach wasn’t shy about ruling her Court with an iron fist, it would seem.

 

And then she turned to face me. I sighed and trotted down the hill to learn how she’d turned my apparent victory into a win for her.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

About forty minutes later, I walked back up to the house. A vaguely canid skeleton walked next to me, its movements utterly silent. You’d have to look closely to see the thin coating of black fog around the bones, or the tiny sparks of blue light burning in the eye sockets.

 

Miraculously, nothing appeared to have gone disastrously wrong in my absence. Snowflake met me at the base of the hill. Oh, she said, sounding less than thrilled. You brought that thing.

 

“That’s right,” Legion said. “Now shut up, mutt. Adults are talking.”

 

“This is where the ward was anchored,” I said hastily, before Snowflake could say anything. “Can you see it?”

 

“Oh, yeah,” Legion said, barely even glancing at the faerie ring. “Definitely recent Sidhe work on top.”

 

“On top? What’s that mean?”

 

“Oh, this is old work. Looks like the bottom layer is maybe five hundred years old? Something like that. Tylwyth Teg, I’m thinking, although that far back the distinctions start to get a little fuzzier.”

 

“That’s ridiculous,” I said automatically. “Five hundred years? You can’t make a ward last that long. It would degrade.”

 

“Sure, but you’ve got faeries dancing in this thing almost every night, I’m guessing. That kind of ritual keeps it fresh, builds on it. Say what you want about them, but they build to last.”

 

“Right,” I said. “Okay. Explains why they were doing this here, anyway, if they’ve been using the location that long. Let’s keep going.”

 

We hiked up to the house without seeing anyone else. “Look around,” I told Legion. “I want to know what’s going on here, what kind of residues you can find.”

 

“You gots it, Boss,” he said, trotting off around the building.

 

I walked inside and looked around. I didn’t see anything out of place, but that didn’t necessarily mean much. “Any trouble?” I called.

 

There was a brief pause before Aiko appeared from under a veil, on the other side of the room. “What’s the password?” she called, pointing her carbine at me.

 

I stared at her. “We didn’t set up a password before I left. Besides, do you really think an impostor could fool Snowflake? Seriously?”

 

“Good,” she said, lowering the gun. Her expression was relieved as she dropped the weapon to hang from its strap. “And no, I haven’t seen anything.”

 

“Okay, this level of paranoia is not normal for you. What gives?”

 

“This is Court business,” she said, pacing around the room. “You can’t be too careful with that sort of thing. Besides, I was expecting someone to show up by now. They know we’re here, and they have to know there’s a chance that we’ll find something they’d rather we didn’t. Sending some people to scare us off and destroy any evidence would make sense.”

 

“Maybe they aren’t willing to do anything that overt,” I suggested. “It sounds like this is still fairly subtle.”

 

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “But you’re talking about Sidhe politics. It’s a sucker’s bet that there’s some scheme going.”

 

I sighed. “Thanks for reminding me. Hopefully Legion will finish up soon, and we can get out of here. This place makes me itch.”

 

Less than ten minutes later, the demon walked up to me. “I’ve got it, Boss,” he said. “But you aren’t going to like it.”

 

“Of course not,” I said sourly. “First off, what can you tell me about the people that were here?”

 

“There are some definite Sidhe signatures,” he said cheerily. “I’m reading at least half a dozen, maybe more. A bit of troll residue, a bit of goblin. You walk in on a party or something?”

 

“Something. What Court are we talking about, here?”

 

“Solidly on the Midnight side of things, it looks like. A few of them might be unaffiliated. Honestly, it’s hard to get details on a magical residue.”

 

“Okay. And now for the big question. Can you get anything about a Faerie Queen in the area?”

 

“Yes, and let me just say that you are incredibly stupid to be getting into that. I mean, you’ve done some dumb things, I think we all know that, but this really raises the bar.”

 

“Less backtalk,” I growled. “More answers.”

 

“I’m getting there. Yes, there was a Queen around here. Definitely from the Daylight Court, I’m guessing Aoife. She did one of the wards on that faerie ring, and a few more around the building. Solid work, a little on the passive side, but solid.”

 

“Yes!” I said. “Can you show that she was in communication with the Sidhe that were meeting here? Telling them we were coming, or something like that.”

 

“Give me a minute,” he said. The shadows around his bones seemed to draw back a little, and the sparks of light dimmed; he was focusing most of his attention on what I’d asked him to do, and he’d shifted some of his essence back to the spiritual side of things to do so. I’d seldom seen him do it, because I generally used Legion more as a lab assistant than a field researcher. He was simultaneously too valuable and much too dangerous to take out often.

 

“Doesn’t look like it, Boss,” he said after a few minutes. “I’m not actually seeing anything from her in the same time frame as they were here. Honestly, there’s no reason she would have; she could have just sent a messenger, or tripped one of the wards they had set up. Just as good and a lot less noticeable.”

 

“Damn,” I said. “Damn. Okay, let me think for a minute.”

 

I couldn’t see where to go from here. If we couldn’t track them, and there was nothing here incriminating enough that I could use it against them, then there wasn’t much I could take to Scáthach. I could always wait for the group to meet again, but I must have spooked them pretty badly just now. And the fae are, generally, patient; they’re immortal, after all. It might be years before they felt comfortable enough to gather again. That was time I didn’t have.

 

I was confused, though, because everything I’d said to Scáthach was still true. I was a tool, and maybe even a valuable one. She could easily have predicted that I would find out where they were, and once I did, it wasn’t hard to see the cause-and-effect chain leading to this moment. Which, in turn, meant that there must be some way to proceed, because otherwise she’d put a fair amount of effort into a pointless investment.

 

Except…now that I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure she wanted me to succeed. Yes, I’d be in trouble with the Conclave if I didn’t, but Alexander had flat out said that it wouldn’t kill me. It would just cause problems, force me to take steps to protect myself. It would make me desperate.

 

In other words, it would make me even more useful to her. A desperate man, hunted and on the run, is an easy one to manipulate. She might even be able to talk me into signing on with her Court, just because it was one of the few forces around that could protect me from the Conclave if they got upset with me.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. We can come up with something else to try once we’re somewhere safe.”

 

“Sounds good,” Aiko said. Her expression was relieved.

 

I started to walk to the exit, and then paused.

 

Why wasn’t Aiko wearing her armor? Under the circumstances, I would have expected her to want as much iron between her and the world as possible. There was no reason for her to take her helmet off.

 

“Legion,” I said, thinking through what was going on as I spoke. “Identify everyone present, please.”

 

“Sure, Boss,” he said, conveying the impression of a shrug without moving. “I’m here, obviously, and so are you. The mutt’s over there, and her shadow is too.” Snowflake growled at him, and he laughed. “Anyway, then there’s the doppelganger. Nice try, but you really don’t know what a kitsune smells like, do you? Come on, even Winter caught you.”

 

“Right,” I said, looking at Aiko. Or, rather, at the person imitating Aiko, and doing a pretty subpar job of it, if I’d caught her this quickly. “I believe this is your cue to explain yourself, doppelganger.”

 

She paused, and then darted one hand at her pocket.

 

Before she could grab whatever she’d been going for, Snowflake bit her leg and jerked it out from under her. The doppelganger hit the ground, screaming, even though Snowflake hadn’t done any real damage. I was pretty sure that bite hadn’t even broken skin.

 

“Iron teeth,” I said, squatting next to her. “Burns, doesn’t it? I mean, iron doesn’t hurt me, so I wouldn’t know, but I imagine it’s similar to silver.”

 

She snarled at me, doing a surprisingly good job of mimicking Aiko’s expressions, and started to go for that pocket again. Snowflake growled, just behind her head, and she flinched and stopped.

 

“I’m not in a very good mood,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time, and I don’t think you comprehend just how much you just pissed me off. So I’m going to explain things in simple terms. I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to answer them, honestly and without keeping anything back. If at any point I think you’re trying to fool me, I’m going to start putting iron filings under your skin. I doubt it will kill you, but I expect you know better than I do how much it will hurt. Are we clear?”

 

She glared at me some more. I reached into my cloak and pulled out a small leather bag and a knife. She blinked and said, “You wouldn’t dare.”

 

I smiled at her. She flinched a little. “As I said, you really pissed me off with this. I don’t enjoy causing pain, and I don’t generally condone torture. But you took Aiko, and I don’t know how long I have to find her before something bad happens. So yes, I absolutely dare. If you don’t start talking, you’re going to find out just how much I dare. Again, are we clear?”

 

I must have been pretty convincing, because the doppelganger looked away and then nodded. “Crystal.”

 

“Good. Where is the kitsune?”

 

“In the bedroom, in the closet. There are illusions around her, but she’s there.”

 

“Snowflake,” I said. “Confirm that, please.”

 

And leave you alone with this thing? she said. That doesn’t sound like a good idea.

 

I’ve got plenty of iron, and Legion is here. We’ll be fine.

 

She snorted, but she went. As predicted, the doppelganger made another try for whatever weapon or escape route she had in her pocket, but she stopped when I grabbed her wrist. Steel gauntlets are lots of fun when it comes to grappling with a faerie.

 

She’s here, Snowflake reported a moment later. Out cold. Hang on, I’m bringing her out there.

 

“Good,” I said, once they were back in the room with us. Aiko had been stripped to the skin, probably so that the doppelganger could use her clothing, but she didn’t look injured. Snowflake resumed position behind our prisoner, and I let her go. “What did you do to her?”

 

“Sleeping potion,” the doppelganger said. “I don’t know how it works.”

 

“How long until it wears off?”

 

The doppelganger started to shrug, then stopped when Snowflake growled at her again. “I don’t know.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “Why did you drug her? Why did you try to impersonate her?”

 

“Those were the instructions I was given,” she said. “Wait for someone to be vulnerable, take them out and replace them.”

 

“Given by whom?”

 

“The person who hired me. I don’t know who he is, not reliably.”

 

I nodded. That wasn’t surprising; they wouldn’t have told her anything more than they absolutely had to, not if she was hired help. “What can you tell me about him?”

 

She licked her lips and looked from me to Legion, then glanced back at Snowflake. The husky growled at her, and she flinched. “He’s Sidhe, fairly powerful,” she said. “Part of the Midnight Court, but not that highly ranked, I think. He and the other people here have a shared interest, something political.”

 

“What part of the Midnight Court is he in?”

 

“I think he answers to Scáthach,” she said. “But I don’t know for sure. He doesn’t like it where he is, I know that.”

 

“This is a lot of information, for someone who doesn’t know much about the guy,” I noted.

 

“I’m a mercenary,” she said bluntly. “I have to know something about the people I’m working for, just as an insurance policy.”

 

“Right,” I said, nodding slowly. “Stay where you are. I need a minute to think about this.” I stood up and walked away, pacing.

 

And then, very suddenly, I saw how to deal with this, and I almost wanted to laugh. Apparently I’d been wrong, and Scáthach actually did want me to pull this off. Or, more likely, it was a test of some sort, and she was happy with either outcome. Or, hell, maybe she actually hadn’t anticipated this.

 

“Scáthach,” I said, loudly and clearly. “I know you’re listening. This is too important for you to not be paying attention. I have something to say.”

 

“And what would that be, my dear jarl?” She chose to appear behind me, much like Aoife had done, but unlike her sister she was slightly to the side, so that she was whispering in my ear. Her breath felt cold on my skin and smelled sweet, with just a touch of something uglier underneath. I wanted to shiver.

 

I took a step away and nodded to her instead. “Queen,” I said. “I have reason to believe that a group of your subjects was here very recently. They have done harm to me unlawfully, and I demand satisfaction.”

 

“What evidence do you have for your charges?” she asked, with a vulpine smile. She knew, and I wasn’t sure why she was going through with this charade.

 

But I could play along. “Logic and common sense,” I said. “The fact that one of my people is currently unconscious. The word of someone who isn’t in a position to lie.” I gestured at the doppelganger, who was cringing away from Scáthach. That put her uncomfortably close to Snowflake, almost touching the steel armor she was wearing, but apparently the Queen was frightening enough to outweigh the pain.

 

“Your evidence is convincing,” the goddess said, not even glancing at the doppelganger. “But not compelling. Allow me to bring the leader of the group in question here, so that we may hear his side of the story.”

 

I opened my mouth, though I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. It didn’t matter, in any case; Scáthach wasn’t interested in my input. She gestured slightly, and I felt a gentle surge of magic. Maybe ten seconds later, a portal opened and a male Sidhe stepped into the room.

 

That fast of a reaction seemed a little suspicious in itself to me. Then again, maybe Scáthach really did expect that degree of responsiveness from her people.

 

“You are accused of doing harm to a foreign power in a time of peace without due cause,” she said without preamble. “What say you?”

 

“I am innocent, my Queen,” he purred in a voice like chilled silk. “I have done no such thing to this man.”

 

“Doppelganger,” I said. “Is this the person who hired you?”

 

She cringed even more as everyone in the room turned to look at her. “No,” she said weakly. “But he was giving my employer orders.”

 

I turned to Scáthach. “There you have it,” I said. “Under your law, he must answer for the actions of his subordinates, when those actions were taken in the context of that role. Or am I wrong?”

 

“On the contrary, your grasp of the legal principle involved is quite accurate,” she said. Alone of everyone in that room, she seemed to be enjoying herself. “It would seem I am faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, your accusations have some evidence to support them, and your word’s value is well known. On the other hand, you are accusing my Duke of a crime, and his word, as well, is known to be good.”

 

A Duke? That couldn’t be good. I wasn’t sure what the hierarchy of the Courts looked like, but from what I remembered of human nobility, a duke was near the top. I hadn’t been expecting the ringleader of this group to have that much authority.

 

“Decisions, decisions,” she murmured. “How shall I resolve this, then?”

 

Nobody offered any suggestions. Hell, I wasn’t even breathing, and I doubted I was alone in that. Nobody wanted to be the center of attention in that room.

 

“I know,” Scáthach said, sounding so self-satisfied that I just knew I wasn’t going to like what she said next. “Let us have a trial.”

 

I hate being right.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I stood on that hill for what felt like a long time, watching the sunset and looking at the hole in the ground, watching as emergency vehicles began to cluster around it and a crowd began to gather. I felt oddly disconnected from what I saw; I knew, logically, that I was responsible, but on an emotional level it felt like I was looking in from the outside.

 

I wasn’t concerned about being found there. I was far enough away that it would take a while for them to look here, and my face was hidden behind my cloak.

 

And besides, what did it matter if they did connect this to me? It couldn’t make them hate me any more than they already did.

 

The sunset was fading and I was trying to decide what to do next when I heard a familiar voice behind me. “Good evening, jarl.”

 

I looked back and saw the leader of the ghouls I’d fought earlier. He was wearing the human guise I’d first seen, but as before, it was…less than perfect. He didn’t seem aggressive, so I nodded politely to him. “Good evening, Jibril.”

 

He walked up and stood next to me, looking at the hole in the ground. “Your work?” he asked idly.

 

I shrugged and nodded. “Close enough.”

 

“I’m guessing the boss was in there?”

 

“Yeah. Her, a bunch of the vampires working for her, a lot of her soldiers.”

 

“Any of my people?”

 

I hesitated, but there wasn’t much point in lying. “Eleven. They’re dead now. Nothing personal, it just seemed…wiser not to take chances.”

 

He sighed and nodded. “I don’t blame you. It’s just….” He trailed off and shook his head. “Damn shame. People like you and her getting in your wars, but it’s the little guy stuck in between that dies.”

 

“You aren’t going to cause problems for me, then?”

 

He snorted. “After this? That’d be stupid. The boss is dead, anyway, so there’s no reason to stick around. I figure we’ll get out of your town. Probably stay away for a while, maybe try to find work back in the old country.”

 

I considered him for a moment, then sighed. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want.”

 

He regarded me with what I thought was an expression of curiosity. It was hard to tell on those features, but I was fairly confident that was the gist of what he was trying to convey.

 

“I could use some employees,” I explained. “I can’t promise it’ll be safe, but I won’t ask you to do anything I’m not willing to do myself. And I can offer you reasonable pay.” I shrugged. “Or you can stay in town without working for me. Just don’t cause trouble.”

 

He pondered that. “Huh,” he said after a moment. “My people might not want to fight for you after all this. But we’ll see.”

 

“Just let me know,” I said. “I won’t hold a grudge against you either way.”

 

He left. Shortly thereafter, so did I.

---

 

“How’d it go with Sveinn?” Aiko asked, ladling mashed potatoes and a mushroom-based gravy onto her plate.

 

“I had Kyi shoot him in the head,” I said, sitting down next to her. Snowflake headbutted me in the thigh and I scratched her ears absently. “Then I traded two of the answers Loki owed me for the destruction of Natalie’s gang and made a job offer to a bunch of cannibalistic ghouls.”

 

There was a moment of silence after I said that. Eventually, Aiko whistled appreciatively. “Damn. I should let you go out on your own more often.”

 

“When you say ‘the destruction of Natalie’s gang,'” Alexis said carefully. “What do you mean by that?”

 

“What it sounds like. Loki blew their hideout up. Nine vampires, eleven ghouls, forty-five humans.”

 

“Forty-five people,” Alexis repeated.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“And…you’re okay with that?”

 

I looked at her. “Alexis. I just had my lieutenant killed for lying to me. I made a deal with a devil to destroy my enemies. I voluntarily offered a job to a group of ghouls that I know damn well enjoy killing and eating people. And the next thing on my agenda is killing a bunch of people as a favor for the queen of evil faeries so that she’ll help me cover up the fact that I murdered somebody.” I started scooping food onto my own plate. “I think it’s safe to say, at this point, that I’m not the good guy in this particular story.”

 

“But are you okay with that?” she pressed.

 

I shrugged. “Does it matter? This is where we are. Maybe it isn’t where we wanted to be, but that doesn’t count for much.”

 

“Hey,” Aiko interjected. “I take offense to that. I mean, maybe you’re in too deep to get out, but I’m not. I stick around with you because I want to.”

 

Not much was said for the rest of the night.

---

 

The rest of the week passed without much of note happening. I bought a bunch of mercury, the other chemicals I would need to make my mirror, and half a dozen large sheets of glass. I was only expecting to need two, but this was delicate work; the chances that I would mess something up were very, very high.

 

I’m pretty sure the people from the chemical supply company thought I was crazy. I mean, it isn’t every day somebody buys almost ten grand worth of mercury and pays cash. I’d had to pay a good bit extra, too, to get them not to ask too many questions about why someone would want ten thousand dollars in mercury. But it was worth it.

 

Other than that, not a lot happened. Aiko bought a video game from a sketchy dealer online, and then we went and burned down his house when he sent her a disc of particularly exotic pornography instead.

 

Alexis spent a lot of time away, talking to the Guards about signing up. I tried not to be bothered by that, with mixed results.

 

It’s strange, how casual you can get about looking at terrifying threats. I mean, I knew that, if we missed this chance, it wasn’t likely that I’d be able to do Scáthach’s favor. The consequences of that would probably be all kinds of ugly. And on some level I was aware that I should feel tense about that, but I just…didn’t. It was like I’d spent so much time under the sword that it was starting to feel comfy.

 

All of which does a lot to explain why, in the days leading up to the actual event, I didn’t really feel any different than normal. If anything there was a sort of vague anticipation, almost like waiting for Christmas.

---

 

It was surprisingly easy to find the secret meeting of secret faeries secretly trying to overthrow Scáthach. We took an Otherside portal to London, then a train to Wales, followed by a bus into the middle of nowhere in Wales.

 

I’d never really done the public transit thing before. It was…about as unpleasant as I was expecting, really. Crammed into a metal tube with hundreds of people, none of whom had any concept of personal space, was not my preferred way to travel. Never mind the security risk it posed, which was significant. Anybody could be a threat in that mess, and you’d never know it until it was too late. Snowflake enjoyed it even less, although her issues had less to do with security and more to do with it not being very much fun.

 

Alexis wasn’t coming along. I didn’t want to drag her into Court business, and she had been…less than enthusiastic about dragging herself.

 

Next time, I resolved, we would just buy a car. We had the money for it, after all.

 

Finally, the bus stopped in the middle of some town the name of which I hadn’t bothered to pay attention to. It really wasn’t worth paying attention to; there might have been a thousand people in that town, but I doubted it. It was the sort of place where you could step out your front door and walk for an hour or two without seeing another person.

 

“Are you sure about this?” I asked dubiously as we got off the bus, looking around.

 

Aiko shrugged. “This is what the guy said.”

 

“It just seems odd. Why would you have a meeting out here?”

 

“Tradition?” she guessed. “I don’t know. This part of the world is where the Courts have the strongest ties, I guess. That might count for something.”

 

I sighed. “I guess. Well, lead on.”

 

“Cool. It’s a few miles away, so I guess the first step is to steal a car.”

 

I stopped. “No. No way. You did not make me sit on a bus just to steal a car as soon as we got here.”

 

“You really want to walk five miles to get to the meeting?”

 

“We have a few hours to spare,” I said dryly.

 

She rolled her eyes and started walking.

---

 

We’d budgeted plenty of extra time, so I wasn’t too concerned about being late. As it turned out, that wasn’t the best attitude I could have had. We were going at a leisurely pace and Aiko got turned around twice, so by the time we made it to the meeting location there was only an hour left before it was supposed to start.

 

Not a huge problem. But I’d have liked to have a little more time to spare.

 

At least it was a pleasant walk. It was surprisingly warm for a September day in Wales, warm enough that the cool breeze was welcome.

 

After we got there, we killed about half an hour playing dice—Snowflake won, somehow—before moving in. I didn’t want to scare anyone off, after all; my deal with Scáthach called for their total extermination. Getting there too early might mean that I only got some of the conspirators.

 

We hadn’t approached too closely, for much the same reason. So it wasn’t until we moved in for the kill that I got my first good look at the place.

 

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I sighed.

 

Aiko gave me a funny look. “What?”

 

“A house on a hill,” I said dryly. “Surrounded by a ring of mushrooms. Could you get more stereotypically fae than this?”

 

She shrugged. “They’re traditionalists.” She took a step across the line of fungi.

 

And froze.

 

“Aiko? What is it?”

 

She didn’t answer. A moment later, I realized that Snowflake wasn’t saying anything, and looked at her.

 

Frozen. Not moving at all.

 

I looked around, starting to panic, and saw that the grass had stopped moving in the wind.

 

“Okay,” I said, relaxing a little. “You might as well come out now.” Then I turned around.

 

My timing was good. I turned to face the woman who had appeared directly behind me just before she could start talking.

 

She closed her mouth and glowered at me. “You’re no fun,” she said.

 

“I try,” I said, studying her. There was something familiar about her, in a way that I couldn’t quite place. She was Sidhe, obviously, and even by the standards of the Sidhe she had an unearthly beauty about her, but more than that there was some quality about her that I recognized.

 

Then I got it. She looked like Scáthach. Not in any individual feature—she had white hair instead of black, and her features were more rounded, less hungry looking—but in her overall bearing. She had the same sense of power, the same presence.

 

I bowed my head slightly. “Queen. Might I have the honor of knowing whom I address?”

 

She glared at me. It was an odd expression, imperious and angry, but with a sense of amusement still lurking underneath. On another face I might have called it petulant, but the notion of applying that word to a Faerie Queen was…inadvisable.

 

“I am Aoife,” she snapped. “The Lady of Radiant Beauty, the Maiden of Daylight, the youngest Queen of the Seelie Court of the Sidhe.”

 

“Try fitting that on a business card,” I said mildly. “Altering the flow of time for the two of us? I’m impressed. I thought that took god-level power.”

 

“I am a deity,” she pointed out.

 

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, and so am I, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. There are gods, and then there are gods. I wouldn’t have guessed you were this high on the list, is all I’m saying.”

 

She regarded me for a moment, and the anger seemed to fade from her expression. “Are you not frightened?” she asked. “Knowing that I hold you within my power?”

 

I shrugged. “Not really. If you wanted to kill me you’d have done it already. I’m guessing that means you want something. You showed up right when Aiko stepped over those mushrooms, so I’m guessing you were using them as the basis for a ward. That means you want something about this, specifically. Am I getting close?”

 

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “I know that you were sent here by my sister to kill these people. I would rather you didn’t.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “These people are from the Midnight Court, right? So why are you trying to save your enemies?”

 

“That is none of your concern.”

 

“No,” I said dryly. “See, I’m here because I need Scáthach to do something pretty important for me. So yes, actually, this literally is my concern.” I frowned. “They’re speaking out for war, right? So that would suggest you want the war to heat up. I doubt you want to lose, so you must think that an increase in the war effort right now will be to your gain later on.”

 

“Stop,” she hissed at me. “Stop thinking. You’re only buying trouble. I tell you truly that you don’t want to help my sister achieve her aims. Do as I ask now, and I will reward you.”

 

I eyed her. “Reward me how? Specifically, please.”

 

“You killed my previous champion,” she murmured. “That would seem to qualify you for the position.”

 

I laughed. “Wow. That’s a new best, I gotta admit. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an offer that assumed I was quite that dumb before. Congratulations.”

 

“You do not wish for the power I could offer you?”

 

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “I mean, really. You don’t think I have enough people telling me what to do already?” I shook my head. “Nah. The power you’re offering has a price tag attached, and I don’t think I like what it says.”

 

She nodded slowly. “I didn’t really expect you to,” she said. “But I had to offer the position to you before I could give it to anyone else. Tradition, you know. So what do you want?”

 

“A lot of things, most of which I doubt you can offer me. But your sister offered to smooth things over with the Conclave. I’m accused of killing a clan mage, and it would be awkward if they decide I’m guilty.”

 

“Ah,” she said. “I’m sure you know that I could do something similar.”

 

“Yeah,” I sighed. “But would it be worth it?” I shrugged. “Look, Aoife. I’m not going to pretend that I know what’s going on here, or what the deeper meaning is. I’m a pawn, and I know I’m a pawn. And, you know, I’ve got nothing against you, I’ve got nothing against working for you. But I don’t think it would be a very good idea for me to get drawn into your conflicts any more deeply than I already am. Not when I’m already under contract by the other side.”

 

“You won’t do it, then.”

 

“I’ll think about it,” I said carefully. “If leaving these people be seems like the better idea, I’ll do it.”

 

“I could make you,” she said. “But I won’t. I get the impression that you’re working for my sister out of ignorance, rather than malice, and I try not to hurt people for making honest mistakes.”

 

“And also Loki would skin you alive if he thought you were poaching me from him,” I said dryly.

 

She laughed. It was an odd, sweet sound, somewhere between wind chimes and birdsong. “And that,” she said brightly. “Good day, jarl.” She vanished.

 

“Ugh,” Aiko said a moment later. “I hate being paralyzed like that. Nice job telling her to screw off, though.”

 

“Hah,” I said. “I knew she couldn’t actually mess with time.”

 

“Or she just didn’t need to.”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew. The same thing had occurred to me, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought.

 

“Let’s find out,” she said. “You guys should be fine to cross the faerie ring. I think the ward was just to alert her.”

 

Nothing obviously bad happened to us as we did, and we started up the hill. I knew before we got halfway up that I’d been right; the door of the dilapidated house was hanging open, and it hadn’t been before.

 

Sure enough, when we got up to the house, there was no one there. I was sure this was the right place, though; there were plates sitting out, and it smelled like recent occupancy. I could smell magic, too, not quite the same as an Otherside portal but close enough that I was confident it served about the same purpose.

 

I almost wanted to laugh. That whole conversation, Aoife offering me deals, it had all been a cover, buying time for them to get out. And I, like a sucker, had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

 

I was getting pretty sick of dealing with the fae.

 

“Damn,” I said. “Damn. Do you think we could track them?”

 

“I doubt it,” Aiko said. “I mean, I could maybe follow one of them. But they took at least three or four different Ways out of here. And even if I could, we’d still be chasing a bunch of high-ranking Court types onto their home ground.”

 

“Right,” I said, thinking. “Could you two keep an eye on things here for a while?”

 

She shrugged. “Probably. Why?”

 

“Scáthach said I should kill these people, or give her an excuse to,” I said. “It seems to me that demonstrating that they were getting support from her archenemy would be a decent excuse.” I grinned. “So I think I should get an expert in to look at it.”

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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“Interesting,” the woman said, wandering around the room. Brave of her, or stupid. It’s a rare person that wanders around my laboratory. “Did you make all of these?”

 

“Most,” I said, not looking away from the rune I was cutting into a length of steel. “Some I acquire from other makers.”

 

“Is their work as good as yours?” she asked.

 

“Seldom. But occasionally I encounter specialty work or novelty items that I want to examine.”

 

“Specialty work,” she said, seeming to fixate on that. “That might be what I’m looking for. I have very specific needs.”

 

I examined the rune. It seemed to be properly inscribed, so I loosened the vice and moved the steel down before tightening it again. Then I picked up the small jeweler’s chisel and started on the next rune. “It’s possible,” I said. “If you have a specific item in mind, I do occasionally work on commission. Prices may vary.”

 

“Price won’t be an issue,” she said dismissively, continuing her slow circuit of the room. Then she paused, standing before one of the shelves. “Ah,” she said, sounding satisfied. “Maybe I won’t need to commission you after all. This might be exactly what I need.”

 

“The dagger isn’t for sale,” I said, still not looking away from my work. Her questions had given me an idea of what she was looking for, and I’d anticipated that she would be interested in that particular item.

 

“I’m prepared to pay a great deal,” she said. “Money, power…you could name your price.”

 

“The dagger isn’t for sale,” I repeated, looking up for the first time since we entered the laboratory. “And your prices just doubled. I dislike having to repeat myself.”

 

The smile on her face faltered. “Listen,” she said, trying to sound seductive. “I’m sure we can make a deal. Vishnu himself owes me a favor, you know. I might even be persuaded to trade that debt.”

 

I met her eyes. They were dark, and made darker by the tattoos around them, which drew in what little light there was in the room. “The dagger isn’t for sale,” I repeated again. “And I will not be selling anything to you, regardless of price. Leave now.”

 

“I don’t think you understand what I’m offering,” she said.

 

“No. You don’t understand what you’re dealing with. I’m probably the single greatest craftsman of magical items in the world at this time. I could produce one object per month for the European clans and live a life of wealth and luxury. And you’re trying to bargain with me like a common merchant.” I looked back to my work, tapping the chisel delicately. Each line had to be incised to precisely the correct depth, for this work. “You may consider this a revocation of your invitation to come inside,” I added. “If you are still in this building in one minute, I will kill you.”

 

She stared at me, then stormed upstairs. A moment later, I felt her cross the threshold, and the front door closed again. A minor effort on my part, almost thoughtless, was enough to lock the door behind her.

 

I cut the next three runes into the piece of steel, then removed it from the vise with some satisfaction. The geometric structure was established, the mnemonic was done, and I’d started work on the trigger mechanism. Another half-hour’s work would be sufficient to finish the piece.

 

I set it down and walked over to the shelf, looking at the dagger. As always, I could feel the magic burning in it, a quietly dangerous power barely restrained by the structure it had been forced into. It was not unlike standing beside a sleeping tiger, knowing that at any moment the tiger might wake up.

 

My fingers hovered over the metal for a moment, barely a centimeter from the blade, then fell back to my side. I returned to my worktable and picked up the piece of steel once again.

---

 

I watched from the house as the carriage stopped outside. It was a fine carriage, elegant black wood pulled by two black horses. The man it had brought was a match for the carriage, dressed all in fancy black clothes.

 

I didn’t trust it. This was a new thing, and I’d learned that new things weren’t to be trusted. Looking like that, the man had to be a nobleman of some sort, and there was no good reason for a nobleman to come to this village.

 

My father had been outside talking to the nobleman for about five minutes when he came back inside. He looked at me with an odd expression, then said, “Come.” When I hesitated, nervous, he grabbed me by the collar and dragged me outside.

 

The nobleman glanced at me and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the one.” He drew a leather pouch out of his clothing and tossed it to the dirt by my father’s feet. It landed with the heavy clink of metal. “That should be enough,” the nobleman said, with what sounded like disgust in his voice.

 

My father shoved me away and bent to pick up the pouch. I staggered, almost falling. The nobleman put a hand on my shoulder, steadying me. I knew I should be grateful, but I didn’t like being touched. I jerked my arm away, trying to get away from the nobleman, but nothing happened. It looked casual, but his grip on my shoulder was like iron.

 

“Come on, boy,” he said, walking towards the carriage. “It’s time we were going.”

 

“I don’t understand,” I said, hating myself for saying it. “What’s going on?”

 

“Your father sold you,” he said, not unkindly. “You’re going to live with me now.” We reached the carriage and he lifted me up into it with the same casual, unnatural strength. He was slender in build, but he had to be as strong as the village blacksmith to throw me around like that. He climbed up beside me and clucked to the horses, which began to walk away. They didn’t seem to be moving that rapidly, or working that hard, but the road passed us by quickly. In only a couple of minutes the village was receding behind us, and the fields weren’t far from the same.

 

“Where are we going?” I said at last. I hated asking questions—it felt like admitting defeat, and my father’s response had usually been a fist in any case—but I hated not knowing more.

 

The nobleman seemed to think about it for a moment. “Don’t worry about that, boy,” he said. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

 

“My name’s Karl, not boy,” I snapped. I knew it was foolish, but being called that rankled.

 

“No,” the nobleman said. “Karl lived in that rathole back there. He had nothing to look forward to but a short, squalid life in that village, working a field. Do you understand?”

 

I stared at the back of the horse’s head. I’d known that was my fate, but that didn’t mean I had to like hearing it.

 

The nobleman reached out and slapped the back of my head. It wasn’t a hard slap, more humiliating than painful. “I said, do you understand?”

 

“Yes,” I said, sounding sullen even to myself. “I understand.”

 

“Good. Now, I want you to pay attention, because I’m only going to say this once. As of right now, Karl is dead. He died the moment you got in this carriage. You’re someone entirely different, and you’re going to become something that fool could never have imagined.”

 

“So what’s my name now?” I asked. I thought he sounded ridiculous, and I wanted to catch him off guard so that he would see that too.

 

I didn’t get what I expected. “You haven’t earned a name yet,” he said.

 

“Well then, what’s your name?” I challenged. I was starting to feel scared, realizing how far over my head I was in, and being scared had always made me confrontational.

 

“You haven’t earned that, either. But for now you can call me Maker.”

---

 

I blinked, becoming aware that I was in my bed. Not a child. Not on my way to live with the man I would later come to regard as an embodiment of the devil himself, and later still realize was just an old, desperate, and terribly bored man.

 

A dream, then. Just one more reason I so seldom slept. Maker’s training had given me a memory so sharp I could cut myself and not even realize it. I pushed myself up to a seated position, feeling the sweat drying on my skin. I didn’t bother with blankets, even when I did sleep. They weren’t necessary.

 

Even after so long, I still found it odd that I could feel the effects of the nightmare—sweating, increased heart rate, all the effects of sympathetic nervous stimulation—and yet I felt…nothing. There was no emotional reaction, no fear, no regret. A side effect of long-term practice of logical, analytic modes of thought. The emotion was still there, but so disconnected as to lose all meaning.

 

Getting up, I turned on the light with a thought and dressed, my thoughts still distracted by the memory of my youth, and then left my bedroom behind. It was a small room, barely more than a closet, and disused. I usually slept for around four hours each week, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to lose track and go months without.

 

As I walked down to the laboratory, I found myself thinking idly about the other children Maker had taken in. I wondered whether any of them were still alive. It wasn’t impossible. No one had survived the fire I started at the end, but some of those who had left before then might still be around.

 

I’d never bothered trying to track them down. I’d worked with those people for years, in a couple of cases decades, and yet I’d never tried to find them afterward. I’d thought of them as friends, but in the end I just didn’t care enough to look for them. Maker had been right about that, just like everything else, damn him.

 

I took a deep breath and sat down at the laboratory workbench. I might not be feeling the emotions that dream stirred up, but that didn’t mean they weren’t affecting me. Clearly I wasn’t yet calm, or I wouldn’t have felt that remote spike of hatred at the thought of my long-dead master.

 

That was unacceptable. The delicacy of making demanded a very specific mindset, and I wasn’t in it. I pulled a notebook down off the shelf and flipped through it until I found a blank page, dug through the drawer until I found a pen, and started writing out an integral.

 

Strange, that it would calm the emotions that memory had stirred up, when this very thing had been what I spent so much of my time on back then. Calculus had been young in those days, almost as young as I was, but Maker had seized on the new mathematics almost before they were published. It was hard to design a truly intricate piece of magic without them. Computers that could do the brute work of the calculations had been a godsend in my line of work.

 

Half an hour later, I was finally feeling dispassionate enough to return to what I had been doing before I went to sleep. I put the last layer down on the piece of steel, stabilizing it for long-term storage, and set it aside. It was a boring spell, one that I’d made probably a hundred times before, but someone would buy it.

 

After that I finished an interesting force field that an African mage had commissioned, followed by a focus designed to facilitate sympathetic magic. Not my strongest suit, but it wasn’t terribly complex work.

 

Finally, just when I was starting to wonder whether I’d been wrong, I felt someone start interfering with my wards. It was skilled work; rather than actually try to disable them, which would have been quite resource-intensive, they interfered with just the portions of the magic that worked to identify targets. Without that, the wards treated everyone as though they were invited, allowing them in without difficulty.

 

I could have triggered them manually easily enough, but I didn’t. Better to let them inside. I would prefer to avoid making this a public issue if I could. For much the same reason, I unlocked the door for them. No sense forcing them to damage it to get in.

 

I counted five people entering the room. One of them was the same woman from before. Three of the others were armed for war, carrying a wide variety of magical armaments. The last was a man of perhaps twenty years, barely more than a child, who hung back towards the rear of the group and seemed uncomfortable. A glance was enough to confirm that he’d been the one to bypass the wards.

 

I was guessing he was a specialist, whose only talent was exactly that. Most mages looked down on such people as hopelessly limited in the application of their skills, which was a reasonable criticism. What too many people failed to recognize was that what they lacked in versatility, they made up for in focus. When you only needed to practice one thing, you could get very good at it.

 

He was smart, too. Smart enough that once they were in, and the others were preoccupied with proceeding inside, he turned and bolted like a scared rabbit.

 

One of the men reached the trapdoor, and found it unlocked. He paused, saying something in what I presumed was Indian. I’d never been good with languages, although Maker had insisted that I learn to read and write in Latin, Greek, and Arabic.

 

The man sounded worried, likely suspecting a trap, but the woman who was in charge laughed and brushed by him. She threw the trapdoor open easily and descended the ladder into my laboratory.

 

“Good evening,” I said. “You are aware that you are trespassing in my home, while I’m present in it?”

 

“I tried to wait for you to leave,” she said lightly, smiling. “But you didn’t come out.”

 

Of course not. Except for the occasional Conclave meeting, I hadn’t left this building in half a decade. “I suppose you’re here for the dagger,” I said. “You know, it’s really quite amusing. You threw your life away for a trinket, and it wouldn’t even do what you want it to.”

 

“Oh?” she said, raising one eyebrow. “And you know what I want?”

 

“Of course I do,” I snapped. “You couldn’t have made it more obvious that you were trying to live forever. I suppose you saw that it was based on principles of vampirism?”

 

“Of course,” she said. “I’ve spent some time studying vampires. It wasn’t hard to recognize the patterns.”

 

“Yes. But it’s flawed. It takes too much. A vampire only draws life from its victims, but that dagger also takes thoughts, and emotions. If you were to use it, it would only be a few years before your core personality was buried in the noise from the people you’d killed. You would, for all practical intents and purposes, be dead.”

 

“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “And…you use this thing?”

 

I snorted. “I’m not that stupid. There are many ways to escape the ravages of time. Had you treated me with respect, I might have sold you one that actually works.”

 

“I will have what I want,” she said quietly. “I know you’re a skilled fighter, old man. But I brought friends. I will get what I’m looking for.”

 

“Hm,” I said. “Allow me to provide my succinct retort. Marchosias.”

 

They looked at me in confusion. Then one of them happened to glance down and saw that the concrete under him was smoking slightly. He jumped aside, and a moment later a beast clawed its way out through the floor. He looked like a wolf, albeit an exceedingly large one, except that he had wings, and his tail was covered in scales. Also, rather than saliva, his jaws dripped oily violet flames. They ran down his jaw without harming the fur and dripped on the floor, which smoked and hissed. Otherwise, though, he looked like a wolf.

 

“Maker,” he said, quite intelligibly. “You called?”

 

“Yes. Kill these fools, and I’ll consider your debt repaid.”

 

“Gladly,” he said, and immediately he rounded on the nearest mage and lunged for him. The man managed to get a barrier up in time to keep those jaws away from his flesh, but Marchosias promptly started tearing at it, and anyone could see that the mage wouldn’t be able to keep him out for long.

 

“That’s a demon,” the woman said, staring. “You summoned a demon?”

 

“Obviously,” I said dryly, reaching into another drawer. “Although I dislike that term for its ambiguity. Obviously Marchosias isn’t one of those disembodied, spiritual entities that most people call demons.”

 

As I was saying that, said demon ripped through the barrier and rushed upon the mage. His victim lashed out at the demon with fire, which almost made me laugh. When the creature tearing into you literally drools fire, how foolish do you have to be to think you could burn it?

 

“You’re mad,” the woman said, seeming more interested in me than in the fact that one of her compatriots was being shredded by Marchosias less than ten feet away.

 

“Not so much that, as that Marchosias and I have an excellent working relationship. And I’m not really in the mood to fight you myself. Speaking of which, catch!” I drew my hand back out of the drawer and tossed a sphere of metal roughly the size of my head at her.

 

She knew better than to catch it, but she didn’t want to let it touch her, either. So she swatted it out of the air with a burst of force.

 

Which, naturally, was exactly what I had expected. The sphere reacted to the touch of magic, unfolding long metallic legs. It landed easily and began advancing upon her, looking something like a freakishly large spider made of metal.

 

The woman looked at the spider, which had extended metal fangs the size of knives and was continuing to approach her. Then she looked at Marchosias, who had finished with the first mage and was currently disemboweling the second.

 

Then she threw her head back and screamed, “Vishnu!” She invested the word with magic, enough to make sure that he heard her.

 

Nothing happened.

 

“Your patron can’t hear you through these wards,” I said mildly as the spider reached her and started biting at her thigh. Its teeth slid aside on the magically-reinforced robe she was wearing, but we both knew there was only so much damage that it could sustain—and Marchosias wouldn’t be slowed by it at all. “Did you think this was the first time I did something I’d rather the gods not know about?”

 

She stared in shock as I returned my attention to my work. It was difficult to concentrate through the noise, but I was practiced at concentrating through distractions.

 

And, a short time later, the laboratory was silent again.

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Several hours later, I was sitting in my throne room back in Colorado Springs. I wasn’t sitting in the actual throne—that thing was agony when I didn’t have seven broken ribs—but a suitably impressive substitute had been found, and ample cushions had been placed in it.

 

It was still agony to sit in. But anywhere was agony at that point, so it was something of a moot point.

 

In addition to the ribs, I had a cracked skull, although the doctor didn’t think it was a serious problem. I was covered in bruises, and I had a cast on my left forearm.

 

On the bright side, I was at least in good enough shape to be darkly amused by the luckiness of my injuries. I mean, it wasn’t like my left hand was good for much anyway.

 

Aiko was making arrangements to deal with the group of fae undermining Scáthach’s position, and she’d taken Snowflake with her. Brick was reporting to the Watchers. It was Kris’s day off, and the rest of the former-Inquisition mages only came in to work for me when I had a specific task I needed them for. Alexis was safe, having managed to get a portal up in time after all, but she was exhausted and currently passed out in a warded safe house in France.

 

At this point I was injured and alone with my housecarls, most of whom were brutal and violent, all of whom were at least a little bit psycho. If I were the sort of guy to regard others with distrust, it might almost be the sort of situation to make me a little uncomfortable.

 

Good thing I’m not one of those or anything.

 

About an hour and a half before dusk, Selene walked up to me, nodding to Sveinn on the way by. He’d taken it upon himself to stay by me while I was injured, somewhere between a servant and a bodyguard. Knowing him, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that he would adopt that role.

 

“Jarl,” Selene said, nodding to me in a way that wasn’t quite a bow. “Katrin has arranged payment for your services, but requests that it be picked up in person from the drop point.”

 

“Take care of it,” I said. “Take Tindr with you to make sure the money is right. ”

 

She nodded. “Understood. Also, we’ve got a confirmation on that thing in the sewers. Sounds like it’s some kind of wyvern variant. Fairly small, and not intelligent. Apparently they tend to avoid people.”

 

I frowned. “Still possibly dangerous, though. Send in the rest of the housecarls before you go.”

 

She nodded again and left. I lounged in my not-throne and waited.

 

Maybe five minutes later, the other four jötnar were standing in front of me, waiting for orders.

 

“There’s a wyvern in the sewers,” I said without preamble. “I want you to kill it, preferably without attracting any notice. Haki, you know the location?”

 

He nodded. Haki isn’t like Kjaran, who never spoke at all, but he still didn’t like to waste words.

 

“Good. Take Kjaran and Vigdis and get the job done. Kyi, I want you with them to do scout work. I think the plan we discussed earlier should work.”

 

Kyi perked up at that, ever so slightly, and gestured with one hand. It was a small movement, and even if someone had been looking they wouldn’t probably have noticed. Not that anyone was looking. It was Kyi, after all, and people didn’t really look at her.

 

I couldn’t gesture in response, not without being noticed. But I nodded, very slightly, and saw her nod in acknowledgment. The order had been conveyed.

 

A few minutes after that, I was alone with Sveinn. “You know,” I said, “you’re really very good at this. The vast majority of people would never have caught you.”

 

He looked at me in confusion. “Jarl?” he asked.

 

“See, that’s the problem,” I said. “Your one real mistake. Why would someone like you have come to work for me?” I gestured vaguely, and winced at the pain it caused my ribs. “The others, I get. If you’re desperate and nobody in their right mind would take you, then it makes sense for you to take a risk on a low-value employer. But you’re competent, you’re reliable, you’re sane.”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

I sighed. “Drop the act, please. I’m aware that you’ve been less than honest with me. I know that you’re a traitor. Let’s just accept that you aren’t going to be able to bluff your way out of this and move on, shall we?”

 

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “What gave it away?” he asked curiously.

 

“Like I said, you’re competent. Why would you take a position with me, when you could work for basically any jarl you want?” I shrugged, wincing again. Why do I never seem to learn how to cope with an injury? “Anyway,” I said to him. “Once I realized that, I started paying a little attention. It didn’t take much to realize that someone had to be giving information about my activities to Katrin, and the only suspects were my housecarls. It wasn’t hard to narrow it down from there.”

 

He nodded again. “I can’t really complain,” he said. “I mean, you only caught me because I was doing my job too well. That’s not so bad.”

 

“Nope,” I agree. “Honestly, I really respect you for pulling it off for so long. You’re good, like I said.”

 

“Thank you,” he said, drawing his sword. “I would have said the same, but then you confronted me about it while we were alone. And you’re injured. That wasn’t smart.”

 

He took a step toward me, and suddenly an arrow sprouted from his knee, causing him to stagger. A moment later another arrow hit him in the other leg.

 

“Yeah,” I said, watching calmly as he fell. “About that. I think you guys can come out now.”

 

Kyi stepped out of the shadows near the entrance, a third arrow already nocked. A moment later Selene walked down the stairs, watching the whole thing with a kind of detached sadness.

 

Sveinn looked around, saw who I was talking about, and then looked at me incredulously. “You’re mad,” he said, pushing himself up to a seated position. “You trusted a demon above me?”

 

“Trust?” I said. “Sveinn, you’re missing the point here. Of course I don’t trust her. Selene reports everything I tell her to Coyote, and probably also to Iblis, or whoever runs the little mockup of Hell she comes from.”

 

“In fairness, that was never a secret,” she said, walking over to stand at my left hand. “I told you up front that was the deal.”

 

“Yeah, and you have no idea how grateful I am to you for being honest about it.” I saw that Sveinn still looked dumbfounded, and rolled my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go through this in order, shall we?”

 

I pointed at Kyi. “You,” I said, “answer to Loki. You’ve been sending monthly reports to one of his agents since you started working for me. You’ve also taken several independent contracts as a hitman.”

 

She blinked. “You are knowing, that I have these things done?”

 

“Obviously,” I said dryly. “I just don’t care. Loki’s going to know what I’m doing regardless, and you’re smart enough not to have killed anyone I care about. Oh,” I said after a moment, “and also you can drop the accent. I know you speak perfectly good English, and that shtick got annoying years ago.”

 

She blinked again, then nodded. “Yes, my jarl.”

 

“Better. Okay, what next?” I grinned. “Oh, right. Tindr keeps Skrýmir up to date on all my financial dealings. He’s also embezzled almost a million dollars from me. Vigdis is working for Hrym. Haki was sent here by the Volsung family, presumably to make sure I’m not planning to make a bid for the title. He’s also being blackmailed for information by someone else, and a few steps up the chain that information also gets to Skrýmir. At this point the only one I’m not sure about is Kjaran, and I’m not sure about anything when it comes to him.”

 

Sveinn considered that for a moment, then nodded again. “Why are you telling me this?”

 

“Because I respect you,” I said. “And I want to make it clear why I’m taking steps to deal with you when I haven’t with anyone else. My other housecarls might not be entirely honest, they might have other deals going on, but they’re still loyal. They do what I need done, and their side projects aren’t actually hurting me. You, on the other hand, were put here specifically to undermine my position and prevent me from maintaining stability in this city. It’s a pretty freaking important distinction.”

 

“Understood,” he said. “So what now?”

 

“I cast you out, Sveinn Wartooth. I call you a traitor. You swore loyalty to me as my housecarl, and you have broken that oath.”

 

“Witnessed,” Kyi called from across the room.

 

“Witnessed,” Selene repeated.

 

Sveinn glared at the succubus. “You are not a jotun,” he stated.

 

I smiled at him. It was the kind of smile that shows more teeth than happiness. “No,” I agreed. “But she is a member of my court, and two witnesses are all I need to expel you.”

 

He slumped. “Understood,” he repeated. “What happens now?”

 

I looked at the jotun for a moment. How much had he hurt me, I wondered? How much of my strife with Katrin could be attributed to the fact that he had generally been the go-between? How much of my difficulty keeping people in line had to do with him keeping information from me?

 

How much of the blame for the Inquisition’s collapse could be attributed to him?

 

Some. Not all, but some. And while the fault was still rightly mine—a more competent jarl would never have allowed a traitor to have such influence—that didn’t negate the portion of guilt that belonged to him.

 

Even a little bit of guilt is a hell of a lot when your actions lead to tens of thousands of people dying.

 

“The traditional punishment for a traitor is death,” I said at last. Jotun law is old-school, and there’s only one crime old Norse culture condemned as harshly as betrayal. “I don’t see much reason to lighten that sentence.”

 

Sveinn took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded. “Understood,” he said again. “As your housecarl, I have the right to ask that you do the deed yourself.”

 

“My housecarls have that right,” I agreed. Another interesting facet of jotun law; jarls are expected to do their own dirty work. “But you took that oath in bad faith. You are no housecarl of mine.”

 

Kyi’s arrow hit him in the nape of the neck, just above his coat of mail, and punched clean through his neck.

 

Sveinn hit the ground in a pool of his own blood, already dead or dying, and a knife bounced out of his sleeve. It looked and smelled like silver, and I was guessing the oily sheen to the metal was not the kind of poison a werewolf could ignore.

 

“Predictable,” I sighed. “Competent enough to try and get me into reach at the end, but he couldn’t see how obvious he was being about it.”

 

“That’s Sveinn for you,” Kyi agreed, moving closer. “Well, that was Sveinn.”

 

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

 

She shrugged, knelt down beside him, and drew a knife. A moment later she stood up, holding his head in one hand, and nodded. “I’m sure now,” she said.

 

“Good. When the others get back, I want you to inform them of what happened, and that you’re now the leader of my housecarls.”

 

“Really?” she said. “Even after I….” she trailed off and gestured vaguely.

 

“Sure. You know that I know about it, and you know what happens if you go further than I can overlook. I’d say that makes you a perfect choice.”

 

She snorted and shook her head. “There’s something broken in your head, jarl. I’m not even a fighter, not really. No one in their right mind would put me in charge of their housecarls.”

 

“Yes,” I said, meeting her eye. “I know. And I know that means that this is the best chance you’ll ever have of being the right-hand man of someone important. I recommend you think about that, the next time someone makes you an offer.”

 

She eyed me, and then knelt and bowed her head. “I am your housecarl, jarl. Whatever else may come.”

 

“I know. Selene, get someone in to clean this up. Thorough is more important than fast.”

 

She nodded. “On it. Do you have anyone in mind?”

 

“Not really. Maybe talk to Pellegrini’s people. I’m sure they have a cleaner on retainer. Pay them out of the operational fund.”

 

“Understood.”

 

“Good. Kyi, I would appreciate if you would clear the room; I have business to take care of that I would rather you weren’t here for.”

 

She glowered at me. “Jarls do not request,” she chided. “Jarls order.”

 

“If you think that wasn’t,” I said dryly, “try disobeying it.”

 

She chuckled and left. Selene followed, off on her task. I looked at Sveinn’s body, and then looked away.

 

No point putting it off any longer. The situation needed to be resolved. And, as Scáthach had so helpfully reminded me, a good card is no better than a bad one if you’re too scared to play it.

 

“Loki,” I said aloud.

 

Nothing happened.

 

“Loki the crafty in lies, Loki the Sky-Traveler, Loki Laufeyjarson, I call you.”

 

Nothing continued to happen.

 

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, hurry up already. I know you can hear me. I want to make a deal, and I’m short on time.”

 

“A deal, you say?” a voice said in my ear. I startled, almost falling out of my chair, and turned to glower at him.

 

Then I blinked. Loki was standing at my elbow, grinning at me, and he looked pretty bizarre. His skin was greyish, his eyes were the kind of green that made you think of poison, and he was wearing what looked like an nineteenth-century businessman’s suit.

 

“What’s with…this?” I asked, gesturing vaguely.

 

“I was at a party,” he explained. “One I’d rather like to get back to. I believe you mentioned a deal?”

 

I made a conscious decision not to ask. “Yeah,” I said. “You owe me nine answers. I want to call one of them in.”

 

“Understood,” he said with a sharky smile. “Ask away.”

 

“Where is the sanctum of the vampire called Natalie, who was until recently the lieutenant of the vampire called Katrin Fleischer in this city?”

 

“I thought I told you that you didn’t need to worry that much about the phrasing,” he said dryly. “Well, in any case, I think it’s easiest to show you.”

 

With that warning, I didn’t stumble when the next blink found me standing, rather than seated. We were on a low hill out near the edge of the plains, looking over a small strip mall.

 

“There,” he said, pointing at the strip mall. “Mostly underground. The stores are a front.”

 

I looked at it and nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’m not using another of my questions. But I would like a bit of clarification, the same way I did more for you than we’d agreed.”

 

He was still grinning at me. “You’re welcome to ask.”

 

“Natalie is in there?”

 

“Yes, at present. This is where she comes to hide from the sun.”

 

I nodded again. That was almost the definition of a sanctum, but it didn’t hurt to confirm. “Is there anyone else in there?”

 

Loki closed his eyes momentarily, then opened them and nodded. “Eight other vampires. Forty-five humans. Eleven ghouls. Twelve hounds, which you might say were built on the chassis of a dog, but they’re something much more dangerous. Aside from Natalie, there’s nobody you know.”

 

Wow. I’d…not really expected that she had that kind of force. I mean, nine vampires is…a lot. If Katrin was to be believed, that was at least twenty percent of the vampires in the city. Add in the human minions, the ghouls, whatever those hounds were, the skinwalker, and you had…a much more credible threat to Katrin’s position than I’d been expecting.

 

Could I take them?

 

I thought about it for almost a minute, and I couldn’t think of a way. Forty-five humans could bury me in bodies, even if they weren’t armed. I’d fought that many ghouls before and come out okay, but I’d had a lot of assistance, and I’d still relied heavily on catching them by surprise and taking them out before they realized what kind of threat I posed. And I had no idea what the hounds were capable of.

 

Not to mention the vampires. If even one of those were up and active, it was likely to be more than I could handle.

 

Maybe I could manage something. I could get my housecarls, the mages, Katrin and her forces, maybe even some assistance from Kikuchi. We could mount an assault on the place, and maybe we could take them out. But it would take time to arrange, time to assemble them, time to plan and coordinate.

 

I looked at the sun, hanging low over the mountains. We had, at most, an hour before sunset freed the vampires to go about their business. Once it did, I might never have an opportunity like this again.

 

Clearly, another avenue of attack was called for.

 

Luckily, I had something in mind.

 

“Okay,” I said, turning to Loki. “You remember that deal I mentioned? I want this place gone. I want it destroyed in a way that’s dramatic enough to make a statement, and I want to be sure that nobody escapes to cause trouble later. You do that, and I’ll forgive one of the answers you owe me.”

 

He made an interested sound. “No one escapes? Not even the humans?”

 

I frowned. What are the chances that some of the humans are innocent victims? Basically a hundred percent. There were nine vampires in there, and that meant that at least some of the humans were food.

 

Then again, not every human that a vampire took went against their will. There were plenty that signed up by choice, for power and the chance at eternal life. With forty-five people in there, it was almost certain that both groups were represented, which made letting them go a risk to say the least.

 

Not to mention the possibility that Natalie would possess one of them, the same way that the skinwalker had possessed one of the vampires. I wasn’t sure she could do something like that, but I wasn’t sure she couldn’t either, and if she could it would make the whole exercise a waste of time.

 

“No,” I said to Loki. “Nobody gets out. Not the humans. Nobody.”

 

He nodded. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “As you say,” he murmured, turning towards the strip mall. He raised one hand, and a bead of golden fire the size of a marble formed just above his palm. It flew out, disappearing from sight in a few seconds.

 

Loki glanced at me, looking for a reaction. I didn’t give him one. He sighed dramatically and then turned back to his work. He gestured slightly.

 

And then a column of golden flame a hundred feet across fountained up to the sky with a roar like a thousand engines sparking to life all at once.

 

I managed not to scream. I’m pretty sure I did, anyway; it’s not like I’d have heard it. But I stumbled back, raising one hand to block the light. Too late; I was already dazzled, blinking away tears.

 

When I could see again, I saw that the strip mall was gone. Just…wiped away, like it was never there. In its place was a circular pit maybe fifty feet deep, lined with glass. Just the same as, although a whole lot smaller than, the one that marked the center of the destruction on the north side of the city.

 

Not surprising. It had the same cause.

 

There was no collateral damage this time, at least. No other buildings were on fire. As far as I could tell none of them had been affected at all.

 

“There we go,” Loki said, turning to me and bowing grandiosely. “I believe that fits your criteria.”

 

“I can’t complain,” I said, staring at the pit. It was almost hypnotic in how clean it was. No blood. No bodies. No lingering fires. Just…gone.

 

“Very good,” he said with a smile two shades too sharp. “You have seven answers remaining, Winter Wolf. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a party to be getting back to.” He tipped a black tricorn hat to me and vanished.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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I was expecting something bad to happen, after that. I mean, it wasn’t all that much of a leap of logic. All was clearly not well with the vampires in my town, and while I had little to do with them, my experience has been that that doesn’t really matter much. When supernatural beings get into shit, there’s plenty to go around. When politics is involved, there’s even more.

 

So I was fully expecting there to be trouble. If Natalie was making a move, and Katrin wasn’t in a position to stop her, I was logically going to be one of her targets. I was an authority figure, a symbol, and taking me out would be a powerful statement. Not to mention that, if she didn’t, I would probably be a thorn in her side later on. I might not like Katrin, but I can at least recognize that she’s a force for stability and calm, and Natalie could hardly say the same. As much as I hated to admit it, in a fight between the two, I would support Katrin.

 

I was expecting an attack of some kind. I don’t think I can reasonably be faulted for not expecting it less than twelve hours after I met with Katrin.

 

Back in Romania, it was just after sunset, locally, but I’d already been asleep for several hours. When you’re jumping back and forth through time zones on a daily or hourly basis, fixing your schedule to the sun is basically impossible.

 

I woke groggy, and it took me several seconds to figure out what had actually woken me. I’d rigged wards to detect anyone with magic approaching the castle, but it had basically just been a measure to assuage my paranoia. They’d never actually done anything before.

 

Now they were going haywire, screaming at me that there was a lot of power climbing the stairs up our little mountain. Fast; the outermost layer of wards was at the base of the stairs, and by the time I was fully conscious they were already tripping wards halfway up the mountain.

 

That was enough to wake me up, and then some. Coffee has nothing on an imminent threat on your life, believe me. I scrambled out of bed and started belting on armor frantically, simultaneously calling up power and reaching out.

 

It took only a moment to locate Snowflake, a long ways down from where I was. She was sitting in the dining room on the ground floor, helping herself to a steak in anticipation of a nap. A moment’s communication was enough to confirm that Aiko and Alexis were both in the castle. My cousin was asleep, and the last thing Snowflake had heard from Aiko suggested that she would be in the library.

 

I told Snowflake that there were probably enemies incoming, and then looked further, outside the walls. There weren’t many birds moving around at this time of day, but I’d made a concerted effort to encourage the presence of predators around our castle. As such, I was hopeful that I could find something.

 

I got lucky. There was a nesting pair of boreal owls a few miles away, and the female was in the area. A small nudge convinced her to alter her course slightly, giving me a good view of the path leading up to our door. It wasn’t great—it was at a distance, and even an owl can only see so much on a cloudy night—but I could make out general shapes.

 

At a glance, I counted around fifteen figures ascending the mountain. Most were misshapen, just grotesque enough to make it clear that they weren’t anything natural. Ghouls, most likely, and I was guessing that there were more around that I couldn’t see. They wouldn’t bother to send that few against me, not after what I did earlier.

 

The other four were much more concerning. They looked human, generally, but they moved with a speed and grace that was entirely at odds with that. It wasn’t the sort of agility that could really be achieved by a human, or even a werewolf. This was more something that would make you complain about the obviously fake special effects if you saw it in a movie. They ignored the stairs entirely, running up the rough ground and leaping boulders, and they still made it up the hill faster than I could have.

 

Vampires. Well, that wasn’t good. I’d never fought a single vampire before, and from what I knew of them, I wasn’t sure that I could. Four of them at once was…problematic.

 

Maybe they were staying away from the stairs to avoid any booby traps I’d placed. If so, they’d underestimated how thorough I’d be; as I watched one of them stepped on the wrong stone, and set off a landmine. The blast of flame and shrapnel didn’t kill it, but they did knock it a ways down the mountain, and it wasn’t too quick getting up.

 

I grinned in satisfaction before releasing my grasp on the owl, returning to my own body. I grabbed my cloak and threw it over myself as I ran for the stairs, leaping down them considerably faster than was safe.

 

Aiko was already standing when I reached the library, having heard me on the stairs. “Trouble?” she asked, grabbing her carbine off the floor. She was already wearing armor.

 

“Vampires,” I said. “At least four, and they have a shitload of ghouls with them. Incoming fast.”

 

She said something rude in Italian and followed me. “What’s the plan?” she asked.

 

“Wake Alexis and get down to the front hall. Hopefully the wards will slow them down, and there’ll be a choke point as they come in the door.”

 

She nodded. “I’ll get your cousin. You get down there and get ready.”

 

Only a few seconds later I was standing in the entrance hall, watching the door nervously. Snowflake was standing at my side, grinning. Her steel teeth were stained red from the steak she’d been eating, which looked rather ominous.

 

She wasn’t wearing armor. I was more than a little worried about that, but there was not time to go and get it and I knew better than to think that she would leave.

 

“What’s going on?” Alexis called from behind me, sounding bleary.

 

“Vampires,” I said, glancing back. She was wearing a heavy leather coat, the best armor she had, and she’d at least remembered to grab her staff. That was some consolation. I glanced through the owl’s eyes, and saw that the vampires were moving more slowly now, taking care to avoid traps. “They’ll be here within a minute.”

 

“How do we fight them?” she asked, moving further into the room.

 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never done it, and it’s hard to find reliable information.” I shrugged. “Cut off the head or destroy the heart if you get the chance. I want you and Aiko providing ranged support. We’ll try to hold them at the door with wards and grenades.”

 

“Got it,” she said, moving into the corner of the room opposite the door. I felt her gather her power as she went, the scents of ozone and snow hanging in the air around her. Aiko took the time to hug me before going to the other corner, aiming her carbine at the door.

 

Bullets wouldn’t kill vampires, not in that light of a caliber. They didn’t inflict the kind of large-scale tissue damage you need to put down a ghoul, either. But they might slow them down, keep them busy while Alexis and I lined up the big guns.

 

We waited like that for a tense thirty seconds or so while the enemy climbed up to us. Finally I started to smell them, a disturbingly strong odor of magic. The predominant odor was blood, but there was something wrong about it, a touch of too-sweet decay, mixed with unpleasant spices. There was a weaker odor of ghoul, not unlike rotting meat, and I caught a hint of something else as well, something even nastier.

 

There was a pause of several seconds before a male voice, just familiar enough that I felt like I should recognize it but couldn’t, said, “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.”

 

There was a rush of power, strong enough to leave me blinking, that smashed the wards on the door, rendering most of them useless. Then something hit the doors, hard enough to make them buckle.

 

Those doors were taller than me and wide enough to drive a truck through, made of heavy ash and bound with iron. They must have weighed half a ton, and they were barred with another piece of iron the size of a load-bearing I-beam. A team of men with a battering ram would have needed probably around ten minutes to get through it.

 

It took three hits from this thing to knock the iron beam off its supports onto the ground. One more and the lock shattered, the doors lolling open.

 

Well, that wasn’t good. I’d been counting on the wards to do some damage, and those doors should have held at least a little while. This was going to cause some serious problems with my plans.

 

Almost the instant the doors were open, ghouls started pouring through, hideous, misshapen things with patchy fur and oversized teeth.

 

I didn’t get a chance to see any more details than that, because the moment they moved in, Alexis hit them with a lightning bolt.

 

Ghouls are tough, but lightning is a hell of a weapon, and she’d been working out pretty hard. Ghouls hit the ground left and right, screaming and convulsing, and the stench of burning fur filled the air.

 

But more ghouls came behind the first wave, stepping on their kin without any hesitation. Aiko started shooting, short, well aimed bursts of fire, and I could see and smell the blood, but they didn’t stop. There were already ten or fifteen ghouls in the doorway, and more coming up behind them. In only moments they would be through, and that many ghouls in a confined space would go badly for us.

 

Fortunately, only most of the magical protections had been destroyed.

 

I sent a spike of power at the doorway, triggering one of the remaining wards, and the doorway burst into flame, a sudden and unnaturally intense fire. It washed over the ghouls, and now it wasn’t just fur burning, it was flesh. It smelled like roasting meat, because that was exactly what it was.

 

More ghouls hit the ground. There was some screaming, but not as much as I’d have guessed. Something was telling me that wasn’t because the fire hadn’t hurt them. At a glance, it looked like a lot of them weren’t going to be getting up.

 

There was still screaming, though, and smoke and smoldering flame and writhing bodies, and in all the chaos I didn’t even see the first vampire jump over the whole mess.

 

The first thing I knew about it was when he was standing about three feet away from me, grinning. I didn’t have time to register much more than that before Snowflake lunged forward, biting at his legs.

 

I didn’t even see him move, but he jerked back about three feet, and Snowflake’s teeth snapped shut on empty air. That gave me enough time and space to draw Tyrfing, though, and he didn’t look nearly so eager to move into reach once that happened.

 

I felt and heard another bolt of lightning from Alexis, but I didn’t have the time or attention to spare. Even one vampire was enough to kill us all if given a chance.

 

Not that I could do much about it. He backed away as I approached, still grinning, and I didn’t want to push too hard and leave myself exposed. I ended up standing about ten feet away from him, between him and the rest of the room. Behind him I could see that the pile of dead or disabled ghouls had grown again. There were still plenty up and moving, though, and Aiko was still dumping bullets into the mass.

 

Then her magazine ran empty. She started reloading, her motions quick and smooth, but it would take a second.

 

In that time, another vampire stepped up, ripped one of the doors off its hinges, and threw it at Alexis.

 

It wasn’t a particularly hard throw. By the time it hit her, it wasn’t moving under much more than gravity. It wasn’t a particularly good throw, either; it barely clipped her.

 

But that door weighed several hundred pounds. Even a glancing blow was enough to knock Alexis down, effectively removing her from the fight for a few seconds.

 

In that brief window of opportunity, while both of our ranged attackers were ineffective, the other three vampires entered the room.

 

Snowflake and I fell back towards the others, watching the vamps warily, as the rest of the ghouls filed in behind them. Not counting the downed ones, there were only around ten ghouls left. Something to be proud of, perhaps.

 

Not much, though. Not enough. Not when there were four vampires inside of our defenses.

 

“I thought you couldn’t enter a home uninvited,” I said, more to buy time than anything. Alexis was still trying to stand, and it would go very badly if the fighting started up again while she was down.

 

One of the vampires—the last one in, I was pretty sure—smiled at me. It looked like a completely normal smile, no fangs or anything. He looked almost bland, except for vivid yellow eyes. “A house is not a home, Mr. Wolf. You may live here, but you don’t claim this land, you haven’t made it a part of yourself.” His smile broadened slightly. “Obviously.”

 

As though that had been a cue, the other vampires fell on us. We tried to fight. It didn’t go so well.

 

“Not bad,” the lead vampire said, wandering around the room looking at things. He seemed completely unaware of the fact that his minions were beating the shit out of us. “A little ostentatious, maybe, but not a bad place. Your patron knows how to make a statement, I have to give him that.”

 

I tried to push myself back to my feet, but a vampire stepped on my hand and grinned down at me, her teeth just a little bit sharper than a person’s. There was a gash across her face where I’d managed to land a hit with Tyrfing, but it wasn’t bleeding the way it should be. There was red liquid oozing out, true, and it smelled mostly like blood, but there was no pressure behind it.

 

No heartbeat. Blood loss might actually be a viable way to kill a vampire, based on where they got their power from, but you’d need to open a major blood vessel and hang them out to drain.

 

“Disarm them,” the leader said, turning towards us. “But don’t kill them.”

 

Apparently the vampires felt this task was beneath them, because it was the ghouls that moved to comply. They took Tyrfing, Alexis’s staff, and Aiko’s carbine, but they didn’t search us with any thoroughness. Sloppy work. I only hoped we’d get a chance to take advantage of it.

 

“You know, I’m surprised that you’ve been so quiet,” the lead vampire said. “Based on our previous encounters, I was expecting at least a few snide comments by now.”

 

Previous encounters? I couldn’t remember having run into this vampire before.

 

And then I looked at those yellow eyes, and realized why that hint of wrongness lying under the other smells of magic in the room was so familiar. “That’s impossible,” I said, stammering a little. “You aren’t a vampire.”

 

The skinwalker smiled at me. “No,” he agreed. “Fortunately, the vampirism process is deeply flawed. It’s to be expected when they’re still using what was, frankly, only ever supposed to be a very early prototype. The results are mixed. Sometimes they produce highly refined killing machines of the sort you see with me. Other times, the outcome is more of an empty shell, hardly more than an animal.”

 

I realized what was going on, and my heart sank even further. “You’re possessing him,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I knew the principle—it wasn’t that far off what I did with animals, after all—but I’d never seen it go quite this far.

 

He answered me anyway. “Obviously,” he said. “I would hardly take the risk of assaulting your stronghold in person. Fortunately, Natalie was quite willing to loan me one of her puppets. I still owe you, after all.”

 

“If this is personal,” I said mockingly, “why’d you need to bring so many friends?”

 

He regarded me curiously. “Are you trying to goad me into a duel of some sort? Because if so, I’m a little offended. Do you really imagine I would have survived as long as I have if I were that stupid?”

 

I shrugged, prompting a warning hiss from one of the vampires watching us. “It was worth a try,” I said.

 

“Your effort has been noted,” he said dryly. “Now, I need to think of what to do with you. Something suitably extreme, I think, to make up for the embarrassment you caused me the last time.” He turned away from us and started toward the throne.

 

I must have been getting better at lying, because none of them noticed my excitement when I saw that. Alexis wasn’t quite as smooth, but it hardly mattered; she was literally shaking with terror already, and hyperventilating. No one was going to notice a minor tell through that.

 

Not that I could blame her. Not knowing something about what she’d gone through at the skinwalker’s hands in the past.

 

He reached the throne and sat down, smiling at us.

 

Then things started to happen very, very quickly.

 

The instant his weight settled onto the throne, there was a loud click. At the exact same time, I pulled a small glass sphere out of my cloak and threw it at the nearest vampire.

 

The land mines rigged to the throne went off an instant later. These weren’t cheap land mines, either, or antique models. I’d been able to afford several modern anti-personnel mines, the sort that even military forces aren’t really supposed to be using. They were designed to produce a very intense, very localized blast.

 

In the field, the expectation is that they enemy will step on one and the blast will damage or destroy their foot and leg. Here, there were four set into the throne, with the intention of turning anyone dumb enough to sit on it into a sack of pulp. The nice thing about that type of mine, as opposed to a shrapnel-based one, was that it was very localized, meaning that I didn’t have to worry about it hitting us.

 

Even at a distance, the sound of four mines going off was impressive. I couldn’t spare the attention to look, but I was confident the look of surprise on the skinwalker’s face was priceless. Hopefully I’d be able to pick it out on the security footage.

 

The vampire caught the sphere I’d thrown, of course, moving almost too quickly to see. The speed of that movement was enough to break the glass, though, releasing a burst of heat and force. Trapped by her hand, it acted a little like an explosive, shredding her hand. She staggered back, on fire. One of the other vamps reached out to support her, moving on instinct, and the fire jumped to him as well, clinging, burning cloth and flesh with equal ease. They dropped to the ground, trying to smother it, but this wasn’t normal fire. There was so much magic packed into it that it was almost alive.

 

And that was my opportunity.

 

I scrambled to my feet, Aiko and Snowflake right beside me. I reached to give Alexis a hand up, but had to flinch away when she hit the final vampire with another bolt of lightning. Lacking a physiology, he wasn’t affected nearly so badly as the ghouls had been, but he still staggered away.

 

The vampire being possessed by the skinwalker was almost unrecognizable as a human body, there were so many broken parts, but he managed to make it stand. Not too surprising; vampires aren’t alive, as such, so there isn’t much you can do to really hurt them. Short of destroying the heart or the head, they were functionally indestructible. Between that and the fact that this particular vampire was being puppeteered by a skinwalker, it wasn’t a surprise that it wasn’t down for the count.

 

It stood there, glaring at us hatefully with those vivid yellow eyes. It opened its mouth, maybe to shout orders to its minions, maybe so the skinwalker could cast some kind of spell or something.

 

Then an anvil fell out of the rafters and hit it in the head. It was a fairly glancing blow, but it still shattered the thing’s skull. The body dropped at once, apparently damaged beyond even a vampire’s ability to function.

 

In the brief window of opportunity that afforded, we bolted, sprinting for the door leading deeper into the building. I was expecting at any moment to be snatched from my feet by one of the vampires, or hit with magic from the skinwalker, but we made it out of the room without incident.

 

We weren’t safe. I could hear the ghouls chasing us, heavy footfalls and hungry panting, and the vampires wouldn’t be far behind. The fire and lightning wouldn’t do much more than slow them down, and I wasn’t sure that even the explosion and the anvil would be enough to put the other one down permanently. Not when it was being possessed by a fucking skinwalker.

 

We were on our home ground, though, and we’d had the advantage of knowing that shit was about to go down. We made it to the central tower without being caught, and slammed the heavy steel door behind ourselves. The ghouls hit it moments later, screaming and tearing at the door, but it would take them some time to get through. That door was designed to hold off an army.

 

Of course, that was no guarantee with vampires around.

 

“Come on,” I said, stumbling toward the stairs. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but apparently one of the vamps had wrenched my leg while disabling us, because I was limping a little.

 

“Where are we going?” Alexis asked, glancing back. She threw another blast of electricity back, but I could tell that she was getting tired. This one couldn’t have had half the power of her first attack.

 

It was still strong enough that the ghouls screamed in pain and jerked away when it hit the door, though. Inexperienced she might be, but my cousin packs a good bit more raw power than I do.

 

“Upstairs,” I said. “I’m hoping the ghouls will take a while to get through, and the vampires shouldn’t be able to come in. The rest of the castle might not be a home, but this tower is my territory.”

 

We stopped in the armory long enough to pick up Snowflake’s armor and some spare weapons, then kept climbing up to the roof. I walked over to the edge and spent a moment looking around, both on my own and through the boreal owl outside, but I didn’t see any more enemies in the vicinity.

 

We’d gotten lucky. They were dumb enough to commit all of their assets to the attack. Not that this was all that much of a surprise, given that the skinwalker was calling the shots here. He was terrifyingly powerful, not to mention flat-out evil, but he’d also struck me as deeply arrogant. I wasn’t surprised that he’d failed to have a fallback plan.

 

“Um,” Alexis said. “Not to cramp your style, but we’re kind of trapped up here.”

 

“No we aren’t,” I said. “You’re thinking like a human. There are other ways out.”

 

She looked at me doubtfully. “Open a portal?” she said doubtfully. “I don’t know if we have that much time.”

 

As if to punctuate her words, I heard the distant crash of the door being broken down far below. We still had plenty of time, though. There were another six of those doors between them and us. That should take them at least twenty minutes, and Aiko would only need ten to open a portal.

 

Assuming that had been the first door. Assuming I’d been correct about the vampires not being able to get in. Assuming they hadn’t brought a ram, or explosives.

 

Shit.

 

Alexis was right.

 

“Okay,” I said. “New plan. How do you feel about flying?”

 

“Oh, no,” she said. “No way. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

 

“Up to you,” I said. “You want to take your chances staying here, be my guest.” Next to me, Aiko was already grinning and stripping off her armor, bundling it up neatly.

 

“Can you even carry that much weight?” my cousin asked. She didn’t sound confident.

 

“Not for long, and not steady. It’ll be more like a steep glide.” I shrugged. “I don’t have a better idea of how to get out of here. You might be okay waiting here, but I wouldn’t count on them leaving without making it up here. If nothing else, there’s a chance that they might just blow the whole building up.”

 

“No,” she said reluctantly, as Aiko finished stripping and turned into a fox. She jumped up on my shoulder, clinging tightly to my cloak. I grabbed the bundle of armor and weapons she’d left on the ground and put it on my back, extending the cloak into thin ropes of shadow to hold it and Aiko in place. “I’ll go with flying.”

 

“Okay,” I said, walking over to stand on the parapet of the tower. I scooped Snowflake up in one arm, took a moment to settle her weight, and then held my other arm out to Alexis.

 

I wasn’t quite sure what happened then. Maybe my foot slipped on a patch of ice. Maybe Snowflake shifted a little and I wasn’t expecting it. Maybe my injured leg picked exactly the wrong time to spasm. Maybe I got a dose of my signature bad luck, and all of that happened at once.

 

Whatever the reason, one of my legs went out from under me. I started to fall back, toward the empty air beyond the parapet. Alexis was standing near me and I stretched my hand out to grab her, thinking that I could still pull this off. Sure, it was a little less graceful than I’d hoped, but I’d take it. My cousin reached to grab my hand, looking scared and surprised but hopeful.

 

And then I remembered which hand I’d used.

 

My maimed, scarred fingers couldn’t exert enough of a grip to hold her, and the slick surface of my gauntlet didn’t provide enough friction for her to hold on. Her fingers slipped through mine, and then I was watching her face fall at about the same speed I did.

 

I couldn’t reverse my momentum, not when I was off balance and carrying probably a hundred pounds of husky and armor.

 

I might have been able to get back up. I could—just barely—support this much weight with air magic, at least for a few seconds. I could have held us in place and scrabbled at the edge, tried to drag us back over the lip. With Alexis helping, it might have worked.

 

But if it didn’t work, it would go very badly. We would be falling uncontrollably, tumbling straight down, and there was no good landing under us. I would already have spent a lot of power to hold us up trying to climb back up, and I didn’t have that much to spare. It would only take a few seconds of freefall for us to build up enough momentum to turn all three of us into smears on the ground.

 

I could say that it was necessary. I could say that it was the best choice available at the time. It wouldn’t even be a lie.

 

But in the end, what it comes down to is this. I had the choice to take a risk, or leave Alexis to her own devices on that tower, knowing that there were enemies rapidly approaching and she might not be able to get out. I had that choice, and I chose the latter.

 

I turned away from her, pushing out from the tower with my legs. For a long, dizzying moment the night spun around us, cold air rushing by us, and then I caught that air and used it, directing it to my own ends. I thickened it and forced it up against myself, supporting our weight and slowing our fall.

 

We were still falling fast, and I hadn’t been able to get as much of a leap off as I’d hoped for. I ended up diving for almost a hundred feet, eating up a good twenty percent of our height, then using body positioning and a ramp of thickened air to convert some of the speed that generated into horizontal travel.

 

It worked, in the sense that we started getting distance. The ground around the castle was trapped pretty heavily, and there was a definite risk of the vampires coming out to hunt us down, so farther away was better. But it also meant that we were coming in fast, and there wasn’t much open ground between the edge of the minefield and the start of the primeval woods that sprawled around our castle.

 

I overshot it.

 

We were going to hit the trees, there was nothing I could do about it, and while I diverted some of my attention to braking our forward progress, we were still going at almost highway speeds. In that sense, the trees were actually a good thing. They would slow us gradually, prevent us from hitting the ground with lethal force.

 

The way they would do that was more problematic, of course. But there wasn’t much I could do about that, either.

 

I did what I could, turning over and holding Snowflake and Aiko in front of myself. Hopefully the armor would protect me from the worst of it, and if not…well, of the three of us, if I had to choose one to get battered to death by tree branches after jumping off a tower, I’d pick me.

 

That was all I had time for before we hit the first of the trees, and after that there was no more room for thought.

 

Branches slapped at me painfully, hitting hard enough to bruise even through the armor. The metal did serve its purpose, though, keeping them away from my skin. I’d have been flayed, without it, but as it was I only had to deal with the blunt force.

 

Not that that was insignificant. We were pretty high up in the mountains, and most of the trees were fairly stunted, but not all of the branches were small. I saw one thick enough to bear my weight coming straight at my head, and barely managed to tuck my chin against the impact in time to avoid whiplash. It shattered on my helmet, sending us into a terrifying spin.

 

We hit the ground at an oblique angle, fortunately, and skidded, bouncing off of rocks and tree roots for maybe thirty feet. We would have gone farther, but I slammed into a tree, cutting our momentum short.

 

I collapsed on the ground, unable to think straight through the pain. Maybe twenty seconds later Aiko leaned into my field of view, dimly silhouetted against the moon. “Winter?” she said cautiously. “Are you okay?”

 

“Ow,” I whispered, whimpering a little at the pain that even that much vocalization caused. “I’m…alive, I guess.”

 

She nodded. “I’m fine, and I think Snowflake’s just got a few bruises. How bad is it?”

 

“Broken ribs,” I whispered. “Several. Head hurts.” I tried to push myself to my feet, tentatively, and had to bite back a scream. “Broken arm.”

 

She nodded again. “I’ll do the portal. We’ll get you back to Colorado to see a doctor.”

 

I wanted to protest, to say that we should go back and save Alexis, but what would be the point? Fighting three vampires, even three half-dead vampires, was daunting at the best of times; in my current condition, it wasn’t even a good joke. Besides, by the time we got back, they would have made it to her position if they wanted to.

 

There wasn’t much I could do, then. Not for her, and not for anyone else, not right now.

 

It was almost comfortable, being absolved of responsibility like that. I lay my aching head back on the ground, and let the world fade to black.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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I looked around, but there was no one close enough to have whispered in my ear except Aiko, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been her. I mean, she has an off-color sense of humor to say the least, but this seemed like a little much.

 

Well, that couldn’t be good. I could only think of a handful of explanations for it, and none of them were very pleasant to think about.

 

Certainly Aiko seemed seriously nervous, and that in itself was frightening. “Serval,” she said, looking around a little frantically. She’d drawn her tanto at some point, which said a lot about what I could expect. If she had a knife out, then Serval was going to be trying to get within knife range, and Aiko didn’t think she could prevent it. “Assassin. She’s quick, vicious, almost invisible when she wants to be.”

 

“So you do remember me,” the same voice whispered. “I’d wondered.” Serval sounded feminine, now that I’d heard a little more, but I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t been able to tell at first. Her voice was odd, almost more of a hiss than normal speech, with odd enough accents that I doubted her vocal cords were equivalent to those of a standard-issue human being.

 

Aiko winced. “I told you,” she said. “Something came up. I couldn’t exactly put it off, and I didn’t have another chance.”

 

“I know,” Serval whispered. “I let it go. But now that you’ve come back here? I think that merits a response.”

 

With no more warning than that, a figure stepped out of thin air and shoved me in the chest.

 

I’d had a moment of warning—Serval was only almost invisible, and it’s really hard to hide a rapidly-moving person at close range—but only a moment. Long enough to brace myself somewhat, but not nearly long enough to dodge or counter the attack.

 

I hadn’t expected the shove to be quite that strong. She didn’t knock me over, but I stumbled back a few steps, and then my foot came down and found no floor to meet it.

 

As simply as that, almost before I’d realized what was happening, I was falling.

 

Fortunately, I have a pretty quick reaction time. I’d barely started to fall before I started analyzing the situation.

 

The tangled mess of walkways in this place meant that, in any given place, there might be a highly variable amount of empty air underneath you. I’d been paying attention, and from where I’d fallen there had been about fifty feet before the next solid surface.

 

I could survive a fall of that height, but there was a significant chance of injury, and it would take an unacceptably long time to get back up here. So the first thing I did was push magic into the air around me, thickening and moving it. The increased viscosity slowed my fall, and the movement pushed me sideways until I hit the side of the walkway.

 

This section was made of something that looked and felt like stone, and it was smooth enough that I couldn’t really have hung from it on my own. But I managed to get enough of a grip on the underside of the walkway to hold some of my weight, and I could support the rest with the air. It would tire me out pretty quickly, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

 

I’m fine, I told Snowflake. What’s the situation?

 

Rather than answer, she sent me a picture of the scene as it was unfolding. I was too focused on keeping myself in the air to get all the details, but I got a general sense of what was happening.

 

Aiko was standing in the middle of the walkway, looking all around almost frantically. Snowflake was directly beside her, and doing a better job maintaining her composure. There were plenty of onlookers, but none of them seemed inclined to step in. Aiko might not be killed on sight when she came here, but it didn’t seem she had enough goodwill for people to help her, either.

 

Serval was nowhere in sight. Snowflake could hear footsteps, but only very faintly, and they were erratic. There was no apparent scent to use at all.

 

This was bad. Without some kind of information to use for locating her, there wasn’t a lot that either Aiko or Snowflake could do to fight back. And neither of them could catch themselves if they fell.

 

I was already pushing it, holding myself against the bottom of the walkway and processing Snowflake’s perceptions, but I didn’t see any other way to proceed. So I extended myself further into the air around me, aiming for sense rather than movement.

 

I lost control of the air, and for one sickening moment I thought I was going to fall. I let go of Snowflake, focusing everything I had on maintaining my grip on the air around me, and just barely managed to cling to the stone. A moment later I managed to get the sensory input I’d been trying for.

 

For once, I got lucky. The Clearinghouse wasn’t trying to mimic a natural environment, and as such it had no real air currents. There were a few disturbances, caused by the movement or speech of other people, but they were relatively easy to control for.

 

In the relative stillness, it wasn’t hard to pick out a clear signal. Someone was walking an irregular, looping course around Aiko and Snowflake, moving steadily closer. Their movement would take them over my hiding place in just a few seconds.

 

There was no time to think about it. I called Tyrfing and flicked the sheath off, letting it fall into the dim chasm below. I checked once more against Snowflake’s perceptions, making sure nobody I cared about was standing above me. I couldn’t be sure—I was trying to compare two vastly different perceptions of the world, after all, and I couldn’t focus on either one without risking a catastrophic failure—but none of us had made it this far by refusing to take chances.

 

So, when I estimated that Serval was standing directly above me, I slammed Tyrfing up into the base of the walkway.

 

With most swords, that would have accomplished little but to break the weapon and leave me looking rather silly. With Tyrfing, it’s generally other things that do the breaking.

 

There was a moment of startled silence. “Impressive,” Serval said a moment later. “It looks like your friend didn’t really fall. Decent aim, too. He almost hit me.”

 

“Look, Serval,” Aiko said, sounding afraid and exhausted in roughly equal proportions. “I know that you’re upset, but do you really think this is the best way of dealing with that? Don’t you want to at least try to talk this out?”

 

“I was willing to talk,” Serval said, in a normal speaking voice, for once. “I tried to discuss this like rational beings. As I recall, you’re the one who rejected that particular idea.”

 

I made it to the edge, and wrapped my fingers around the lip of the walkway. Serval just as promptly stomped on them. I didn’t react, except to bring my right hand up next to my left.

 

She was still for a moment, apparently wondering why my fingers hadn’t been crushed, and I got my first look at the assassin known as Serval. She was smaller than a human, almost closer to a child’s size. I couldn’t see much detail, between her veil of almost-invisibility and the dark cloak she was wearing, but I got a glimpse of coffee-colored skin and patchy fur.

 

That was all the time I had before Snowflake hit her from behind, jaws clamping on the ankle of her supporting leg and jerking sideways. At the same time I yanked my hand away, further destabilizing her.

 

Serval wobbled on the edge for a moment. Then Snowflake let go and lunged forward, slamming one shoulder into the assassin’s hip. She tumbled silently over the edge, quickly vanishing from sight in the shadows below.

 

Aiko walked over and gave me a hand, and I pulled myself easily up and over. “Never thought I’d be grateful for this,” I said, staring at my left hand. Serval had stepped on my fingertips, which were mostly gone. What was left of that hand was mostly scar tissue, and I didn’t really have enough feeling in it to register pain.

 

“Let’s get moving,” Aiko said, disregarding my comment. “That fall won’t kill her.”

 

“Right. You want to get started on the portal, and I’ll watch out for more unwelcome company?”

 

She nodded, and started spinning magic into the air.

---

 

“Okay,” I said, while we waited for Snowflake to wake up and I made sure my hand wasn’t actually broken. Normally I wouldn’t have been willing to expose that kind of weakness in such a dangerous environment, but I didn’t think I had to worry in this neighborhood. They still remembered my first visit. “Do we need to worry about her chasing us?”

 

“Nah,” Aiko said confidently. “Serval’s scary, but she’s not the type to really hold grudges. If she were going to hunt me down, she’d have done it by now.”

 

“That’s good. I can’t say I like the idea of having her chasing us.”

 

“You have no idea,” she said dryly. “I’ve seen her in action. Deeply scary stuff. If she really wanted to hurt me, we wouldn’t have made it out of there in one piece.”

 

“What’d you do to piss her off?”

 

“I kind of screwed her on a business arrangement. I was supposed to provide transportation and a distraction on a job. But that was at the same time as the other mess, and I’d signed up with Ryujin by the time the job went down.”

 

“You know,” I said after a moment, “I don’t think you get to make fun of me anymore. I’ve gotten mixed up in some questionable stuff, but you’ve got me beat.”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she sniffed. “Serval’s a nasty sort, but she isn’t remotely as scary as a deity. Speaking of, it sounds like the next chance to find the people Scáthach wants dead is next week.”

 

“Right.” I rubbed my hand; none of the bones were broken that I could tell, but it ached more than usual. Thanks a bunch for that, Serval. “There are a few things I’ll probably need to take care of in Colorado before then. But do you want to go home for a while first? I could use a break.”

 

“Sounds good to me.”

 

“Cool,” I said, and started working on the next portal.

---

 

Eleven hours later the phone rang, waking me from a relatively sound sleep. I grabbed for it, forgot that one of my hands was semi-functional at best, and fumbled it in the dark. By the time I managed to actually answer the thing I was thoroughly awake, tangled in bedding, and not in a particularly pleasant mood.

 

This was not significantly changed when Sveinn said, “Heill, herra. Katrin’s messenger just arrived with information about the meeting she was requesting a security detail for.”

 

Shit. I’d forgotten about that. “Tell me.”

 

“It’s intended to settle a dispute with another vampire. Something about property or personnel; the messenger wasn’t very clear.”

 

“Wonderful,” I said sourly. “When and where?”

 

“At Pryce’s, midnight tonight.”

 

I tried to work out how many hours that was from now, but wasn’t awake enough to do time zone conversions in my head. It hardly mattered, anyway; my response wouldn’t change because of that, after all. “All right,” I told him, getting out of bed. “Get a team together. I want you, Kjaran, Vigdis, and Brick ready to go an hour before the meeting. Dress to impress. Understood?”

 

“Understood,” he said.

 

“Good,” I said, and hung up on him. I glowered at the phone, grumbled to myself, and started throwing on clothing more or less at random. Snowflake laughed at me in the back of my head, at which point I started grumbling at her too.

 

I ended up having several hours of spare time before I had to leave. I checked that Alexis had made it back safely, which she had, and then left her to sleep. She hadn’t come home when I went to bed, so I knew she still needed more sleep. Then, feeling somewhat at a loss for what to do, I went down to the lab and ran my modified schematics by Legion. He mocked me to what I felt was a slightly excessive degree, but eventually agreed that the adjustments I’d proposed to the power flows should stabilize it considerably.

 

At that point, the only real problem still getting in the way was the actual mirror, which was more of a challenge than it sounded like. I needed to be present for the manufacturing process to properly enchant the thing, which ruled out just buying one, and the choice of materials was rather important as well. Silver was the traditional choice, but for rather obvious reasons that wasn’t a very good option for me. Steel was better, but not very good for reflection, and from what I’d read aluminum wasn’t that great of a material for taking an enchantment. Mercury took magic pretty well, and you could make a decent mirror with it, but the toxicity issues made that somewhat problematic as well.

 

Eventually, though, I couldn’t really justify spending more time working on it, and left for Colorado Springs. None of the others came with me, which I couldn’t really blame me for. I mean, I was going to provide security for a meeting between two factions of vampires. I didn’t want to be there, either.

---

 

It caused a bit of a stir when I walked into Pryce’s. The patrons there tend to be fairly hard to rattle, but I was fully armored and openly armed, and most of these people had a pretty good idea of who I was. Intentional or not, I’d become a pretty major player on the local scene.

 

I walked straight to the bar, where Pryce was standing, clearly waiting for me. The housecarls drifted behind me, while Brick maintained some distance from them.

 

“Meeting,” I said. “I’m here for security.”

 

Pryce nodded. A moment later, without any clear signal from him, one of his employees stepped up next to me. I followed him through a few narrow hallways to the private room, where he left us.

 

My group was the first to arrive, which was good. I glanced around the room briefly, making sure that nothing had been moved, and then arranged my minions around the edges of the space. For my part, I stood by the door, where I would be able to greet each person as they entered.

 

Less than ten minutes later the door opened. Katrin stepped through, followed closely by Hrafn. He nodded at me, the gesture as close to friendly as a vampire could reasonably hope to get, and went to sit at the table.

 

“I appreciate your providing this service,” Katrin said to me. Her bearing was more pleasant than it often was around me, but I wasn’t fooled. Katrin and I might not be enemies, precisely, but we were never going to be allies.

 

“I appreciate that you are willing to entrust your security to me,” I said. The implication that she needed me to provide security was clear enough that everyone would probably notice, but not blatant enough that she could really complain.

 

“You are the jarl of this city,” she said sarcastically.

 

“Speaking of which, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you, after the meeting.”

 

“Very well. In the meantime, I expect you to remain impartial throughout these proceedings. The funds will be transferred within a week.” She went to sit beside Hrafn without waiting for a response, which was just as well, given that I didn’t really have one.

 

As I’d expected, the vampires didn’t talk while we waited for the other side of this negotiation. Or move. Or breathe. On the whole, they were fairly boring people to pass the time with. I wouldn’t have cared so much—it wasn’t like I wanted to pass the time with them—except that it turned out the other side was running late.

 

Really late. By the time the door opened again, it was almost one in the morning. Compared to the punctuality I was more accustomed to when dealing with supernatural beings, it was hard to see it as anything other than a deliberate insult. The only question was who the insult was directed at.

 

Finally, just when I was seriously considering telling Katrin to go to hell, another vampire walked in. This one was male, insomuch as sex could be assigned to the walking dead, with dark skin and terrible taste. Seriously, I had seen flamingoes that were less eye-searingly pink than this guy’s suit.

 

He walked by me without even looking at me, for which I was more than a little grateful, and went straight to Katrin. “Good evening, my dear,” he said to her, taking off his purple top hat and bowing.

 

Katrin did not look amused, or impressed. “Lucius,” she said. “You’re late.”

 

“I was delayed,” he said with a grin, vaulting the table and landing in the chair opposite her. “It happens.”

 

“Be that as it may,” she said. “We had an agreement. If you were going to be delayed by this much, you shouldn’t have agreed to meet at this time in the first place.”

 

“Oh, get over yourself,” he said lightly. “If you’re in such a rush, why don’t you get to the point?”

 

I would have expected Katrin to react rather badly to that kind of impudence, but she didn’t say a word. I could see by the tension in her posture that she was exactly as upset as I had imagined, but there was no overt reaction at all.

 

Well, that was concerning. If Katrin was that hesitant around this vampire, I was pretty sure I should be even more grateful that he’d overlooked me.

 

“Your people have been in my territory,” she said after several long moments. Her voice was tight. “Repeatedly.”

 

Lucius yawned, showing teeth that were more than slightly too long. “What’s your point?”

 

“My point is that this city is mine. The vampires here answer to me. I don’t tolerate intruders or poachers.”

 

“So kill them,” he said lazily. “They’re just spawn. I can always make more if I want some.”

 

Katrin took a deep breath and let it out, though I knew that she didn’t need to breathe. “Are you saying that you won’t keep your people under control?”

 

“Why should I? If they decide to go to another continent and get into trouble, what should I care?”

 

“Don’t give me that,” she snapped. “Your spawn don’t do anything without your command. So tell me, why have you been sending them to poach in my territory?”

 

“Because I want to,” he said. His voice was no longer lazy or amused. “Remember your place, my dear. You may have found a city to govern in your exile, but I rule a continent. I am an emperor. If I choose to take this city from you, you will know. Because it will be mine.” He stood and smiled at her. “Now, if that’s all, I should be going. So much to do, you know.”

 

Katrin said nothing.

 

“I thought so,” he said. “Good evening, my dear. Jarl, I hope your day goes well, and good luck with the faeries.” He grinned at me as he sauntered past.

 

“I despise that man,” Katrin said, almost a minute later. “Wolf, what did you want to talk about?”

 

I blinked. “Huh?”

 

“Before this farce, you said you had something to say,” she said impatiently. “What is it?”

 

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Why did you bring ghouls into the city without notifying me?”

 

“I didn’t. That would be ridiculous.”

 

“Then explain why, when I went to confront them, they said they had permission to be in my city. And why Natalie then showed up and stopped me from killing them, saying that they were here under your protection.”

 

Katrin was silent for several seconds. “Natalie and I have our differences,” she said at last. “You know that.”

 

“Wait a second. Are you seriously telling me that isn’t resolved yet? You’ve had years to deal with her. How have you not fixed this problem?”

 

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” she snapped. “I didn’t bring any ghouls into this city, and any that are here are most certainly not under my protection.” She stood and stalked past me out the door, her attitude clearly conveying that anyone getting in her way could look forward to a very bad day. Hrafn followed her out, giving me an apologetic look on the way.

 

The room was silent for several seconds. “Well,” I said at last. “That was unpleasant. Let’s go.”

 

Back in the main room, things had quieted considerably. By which I mean that Pryce was the only person left in the bar.

 

I looked around. This wasn’t right; it was late, but not that late. There should still have been plenty of people here.

 

“What happened?” I asked.

 

Pryce grunted. “People were worried. Didn’t want to stay.”

 

“I don’t get it. I’ve had meetings with Katrin here before, and she didn’t bother people this much.”

 

“Problem isn’t the vampire.”

 

I worked that through. If people were concerned, and it wasn’t the vampire….

 

“Oh.”

 

He nodded. “You scare people.”

 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

 

“You are trouble, Wolf. Don’t come back.”

 

I blinked. “You’re banning me?” Of all the things I’d ever expected to have to deal with, that hadn’t been one.

 

“Yeah. Nothing personal. Business.”

 

“Business,” I said dully. “Right. I understand.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “Sorry, Pryce. I’m…sorry.”

 

He grunted and picked up an empty glass, polishing it with a spotless white rag that he produced from somewhere. I turned and left, my minions trailing silently behind me.

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